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How Will You Deal With $10 a Gallon Gas?

The Dear Leader has Decided to pause – briefly – for a perfunctory congressional approval before triggering what could be TEOTWAWKI – the end of the world as we know it – by lobbing bombs at Syria. Which will likely result in Syria (and perhaps Iran, allied with Syria) lobbing bombs at Israel, the proxy poodle (or is it the reverse?) of the United State (“s” left off in the interests of accuracy). Whereupon the entire region – then the world – may well go up in flames. At least, until it runs out of oil.

It is shit statue-carving crazy.

Yet, “we” – meaning, they – Dear Leader and his relative handful of minions who control the missiles, the ships and “the troops” – appear determined to pursue this course nonetheless. Despite the obvious implications – and in spite of the equally obvious horn o’ plenty of reasons not to do it. Wait. Check that. There is a reason – several of them, actually. Just not the ones publicly stated. No one but a madman could entertain the idea of deliberately batting at a hornet’s nest that one could just as easily walk around. What goes on inside Syria may be tragic, but it’s not our tragedy. We – that is, the Dear Leader, et al, – are neither wanted nor requested – and have about as much right to lob bombs at the Syrian government over its alleged abuse of its people as Syria has to lob bombs at America over its government’s abuses of its people – none of them mere assertions based on iffy “intel” but admitted to, openly, by its government. For instance, rendition. And torture as state policy. Indefinite detention. And that’s only the recent stuff. Let’s not forget who helped “Saddam” gas Iranians back in the ’80s. Or helped violently depose the “democratically” elected leader of Iran – ushering in the Shah and his Savak. “We” are in no position to lecture anyone about “human rights.” Much less bomb them over it.

Besides which, it would serve no purpose other than to cause the people over there – aka, the “evildoers” – to hate us even more. Not because of “our freedoms” (those being long gone) but for the simple, obvious reason that this country is an arrogant, know-nothing bully with big biceps and a very, very small brain.

Unless the shit statue-carving madmen in charge aren’t nuts – and have a different purpose in mind.

Perhaps that purpose is $10 gas.

They know perfectly well this is the likely result of “intervening” in Syria. And what it would mean. A catastrophe, economic and human.A political debacle, too – assuming they will ever have to account to the electorate, whom they clearly hold in increasingly obvious contempt.

Yet, they champ at the bit.

One cannot make sense of it – unless one views it from their perspective.

Because it would achieve, at a stroke, everything they have been trying to implement, piecemeal, and with only mixed results, for decades (if not longer). It would render 95 percent of the population destitute, dependent, freaked-out scared – and most of all, immobile – within a matter of days.The populace would be ready, then. One must never forget the advice of that latter-day Machiavelli, Rahm Emanuel: You never want to let a crisis got to waste.

Try to imagine what it would be like. Almost overnight, the cost of food and other necessary staples would triple. Transport would shut down. People in cold areas would face freezing to death in their homes. People in hot areas could no longer afford to run the AC – or the refrigerator.

It would take three times as many dollars to fill up your vehicle. But your income would not triple.

You and I – and millions of others – would be wiped out, 1929 style. Only the uber-elites who run the show – who hurled the bombs or cheered the ones who did – would remain unaffected. The Dear Leader’s limousine will not be idled; his four-engined 747 won’t be grounded.

There is always fuel for Dear Leaders.

Meanwhile, most of us will not be going anywhere – which is just how Dear Leaders have always wanted it. They have tried to herd us into “public” (that is, government-run) mass transportation but we – most of us – have successfully resisted. Chiefly because we have been able to afford our privately owned forms of transportation. $10 gas would end that far more efficiently than any law or regulation precisely because the Dear Leaders could feign sympathy, Jimmah Carter-style – while lecturing the hoi polloi about the necessity to “conserve.” Perhaps Obama will wear a sweater as he sits before the Tele-Prompter.

If nahhnlevven was sufficient to get most Americans to accept a government that accepts virtually no limits on its authoritay, just imagine – if you can – what $10 a gallon gas would accomplish. Our world – as we have known it – would come to an end. But a new world – the world being readied for us – will be there to take its place.

Better get ready. Better enjoy being able to go for a drive just for the hell of it while you still can. And, better stock up. There have been all-too-many false alarms; too much in the way of glib doomsaying. But this one’s potentially the real deal. Whatever’s truly going on behind the scenes, you can rest assured it’s not being done with your interests or mine in mind. It is not being done by crazy – or incompetent – people, either. They know very well what they are doing – and why.

Since none of us can do a damn thing about it – in terms of stopping the machinery that’s been set in motion – the most we can do is prepare ourselves for the likely outcomes. This includes psychologically preparing ourselves for what may happen over the coming weeks and months.

Don’t think it can’t happen – because it can.

Its happening may in fact be a foregone conclusion.

Throw it in the Woods?

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298 comments for “How Will You Deal With $10 a Gallon Gas?”

Tor Minotaur

September 14, 2013 at 4:26 pm

After brief research, I increase the vehemence of my dismissal of Gandhi as a shitbag shill. Now I score 10% of what he said and did as being beneficial. 90% was typical Ayn Rand villainry and worship of witch doctors and murderers.

Found this on the web[1]

To look at Gandhi in the context of technology is to understand that he was a man who had his doubts on modernism and looked beyond that….

….When once asked ‘Do you hate machines?’ ‘No’, answered Gandhi ‘While my body on itself is nothing but a meticulous machinery How can I dismiss it? My spinning wheel or even this toothpick, for that matter, is a machine. I hate not the machines, but this growing passion for machines. I hate the passion for the machines which work upon diminishing man power. Some talk about machines which could spare man power when thousands of people are thrown jobless on the streets. Yes, I want the human toil and time to be spared not just for a sect of people but for the humanity. I want the wealth to be accumulated not just in few hands but for all the people in the world. Today machines favor putting a handful of people on top thousands.’[2]

Gandhi at the same time was not against modernization. He was against worshipping technology as a lord of salvation.[3] As he thought salvation can never be brought from outside but attained internally. When one’s soul is intoxicated by greed, [4]Gandhi thought technology inevitably represents it.

He was not unaware of the role of tools in human upliftment. In fact, he had great curiosity towards tools. He had accepted many of the modern technological inventions not as a compromise but as a necessity.

He traveled on trains, buses, and ships. He once studied mechanism of propeller from the motor room while traveling on a ship to England. He reached out to the public through loudspeakers and printing machines. He was against mechanization at the same time.

This contradiction must be looked upon from his conception on tools. Gandhi though tools are, and must be, mere extensions of our body. Man expanded his body with his creative potential into tools. Tools make it possible for man to do things that are detailed and sophisticated. A thread can be spun by hand but a spinning wheel does it more efficiently. At this level machine remain as a part of man’s creative potency.[5]

[1] http://ajithanmotherearth.blogspot.com/2012/07/gandhi-on-technology.html
[2] There no reason he couldn’t champion modifications to machines that empower individuals. He’d rather be a moocher, and use the genius of others with little or no compensation.
[3] He didn’t like sharing power with machines. He wanted to be part of the ruling worshipped class. Machines don’t force you to worship them. It’s scumbags like Gandhi that want men on their knees worshipping the world and other men.
[4] Mustn’t let anyone get intoxicated. Need everyone sober so they can really concentrate on groveling in the dirt and worshipping the mud and manly tools of real men grunting about in a quarry like bipedal pigs.
[5] He has a specificity for human behavior as laser focused and refined as Marx. I actually have a lot more respect for Marx than Gandhi now. Gandhi was a puppet of regime changers. Marx was a rabid agitator who felt ends justified any means.
– – – – –

Modernity – I appreciate N N Taleb’s sage criticisms of modernity, but why must everything be an either or? There can be freedom of hyper-modernity one day, and rustic neolithicism the next day.

The creation of un-natural opposing forces where there need not be is the essence of the Eugenic Occultism that’s plagued our world for millennia.

Ozy, there you elucidate the saving grace of the fecal-flecked denizens of the American Monkey House – their steadfast ethical refusal to revert to the designated troops of the zoos and zookeepers as commanded by the Rainbow Coalitional League of International Betters.

1 first question that has to be answered, as a precondition of any attempt to define, to judge or to accept any specific system of ethics, is: Why does man need a code of values?

2 This is crucial. The first question is not: What particular code of values should man accept? The first question is: Does man need values at all—and why?

3 Ethics is an objective, a metaphysical necessity of man’s survival.

4 To quote from John Galt’s speech: “Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice—and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man—by choice; he has to hold his life as a value—by choice; he has to learn to sustain it—by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues—by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.”

V The standard of value of Libertarian ethics—the standard by which one judges what is good or evil—is man’s life, or: that which is required for man’s survival qua man.

6 Since reason is man’s basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil. Since everything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort, the two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational being are: thinking and productive work.

7 Man must choose his actions, values and goals by the standard of that which is proper to man—in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life.

8 Life or death is man’s only fundamental alternative. To live is his basic act of choice. If he chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course.
9 The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

X Sweep aside those parasites of subsidized classrooms, who live on the profits of the mind of others and proclaim that man needs no morality, no values, no code of behavior. They, who pose as scientists and claim that man is only an animal, do not grant him inclusion in the law of existence they have granted to the lowest of insects. They recognize that every living species has a way of survival demanded by its nature, they do not claim that a fish can live out of water or that a dog can live without its sense of smell—but man, they claim, the most complex of beings, man can survive in any way whatever, man has no identity, no nature, and there’s no practical reason why he cannot live with his means of survival destroyed, with his mind throttled and placed at the disposal of any orders they might care to issue.

X1 Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, like Gandhi, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value. Do they tell you that the purpose of morality is to curb man’s instinct of self-preservation? It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the man who desires to live.

X2 If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man’s only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a “moral commandment” is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

X3 Libertarian morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists—and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason—Purpose—Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge—Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve—Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man’s virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.

X4 You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island—it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today—and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; reality will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.

XV A moral code is a system of teleological measurement which grades the choices and actions open to man, according to the degree to which they achieve or frustrate the code’s standard of value. The standard is the end, to which man’s actions are the means.

X6 A moral code is a set of abstract principles; to practice it, an individual must translate it into the appropriate concretes—he must choose the particular goals and values which he is to pursue. This requires that he define his particular hierarchy of values, in the order of their importance, and that he act accordingly.

X7 Morality pertains only to the sphere of man’s free will—only to those actions which are open to his choice.

X8 A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality.

X9 In spite of all their irrationalities, inconsistencies, hypocrisies and evasions, the majority of men will not act, in major issues, without a sense of being morally right and will not oppose the morality they have accepted. They will break it, they will cheat on it, but they will not oppose it; and when they break it, they take the blame on themselves. The power of morality is the greatest of all intellectual powers—and mankind’s tragedy lies in the fact that the vicious moral code men have accepted destroys them by means of the best within them.

first, dang, not for the first time i wonder if you use one of those faster,non-qwerty keyboards, or possibly two keyboards, simultaneously? in conjunction with a mercurial mind, too, of course….

some of rand is kruger (22 karat), & some of it is mcnally (the map ain’t the territory). since poring over her maps would be tedious for me right now, &/or because cocktail hour is already 30 minutes expired (i will have to make up that time), just this….

“their steadfast ethical refusal…”

the global, historical, humanmass monkeyhouse, (forget about the amerikan map coordinates…)…are you sure you’re not scrutinizing a rorschach map? revert? where does the mean revert to? if those reverted meanies fall in your (presumable…theoretical…benefit of the redoubtful…) individualist location, will you make a sound (or will you just be swallowed up before you have the chance to peep?)

Since I’m in the forest, I might be blind to reality. What is the perspective of they who see us merely as a collection of trees?

Assume American were completely dissolved by her creditors: top half states and overseas territories foisted upon Canada. Bottom half states conjoined with Mexico.

Is this any kind of loss to humanity in your eyes? Are Americans exceptional paragons? Are they typical heathens, who control vast resources and real estate acreage through pure happenstance? Are they something else I haven’t considered?

i think web weaver birds of a feather flock together. i think that bulls, & bullshitters, occasionally get a horn in, but that they continue to belong to / be of the matadors & cowboys & meat packers. “trees” (amerikan, aussie, whatever/wherever)…rooted in place, belong to the forestry service, the lumberjacks, the bark beetles, & fire – & all parties & entities know the play, accept the formula, & method-project their resignated roles with fulsome sound & fury, signifying nothing, clear out to the cheap seats. so much for bull & tree telos. i think that the austrian observation that socialism (not to mention all the other authoritarian ism’s) can’t calculate is prima facie, even to many optimists, but that optimism’s (which may well underlie all those authoritarian ism’s) same innumeracy is sub facie. make that sub sub facie; a physiological imperative/impedimenta in some, based on sheer terror (wilde) in others (this may well be a false distinction, terror may encompass nearly the entire existential terroir, i haven’t decided yet, but its probable…hmmm, optimism – the original terrorism). i think there’s no reason to go all the way to oz for a drink, ozy’s wine racks & liquor cabinetry are only paces away…&, in vino veritas, as the good doctor here affirms

speaking of aussies, tho, we recently adopted a mini aussie shepherd. she’s two. almost immediately she taught our welsh springer spaniel, who is 9, new tricks. not that it’s not ever too late, it often is, but, sometimes, old dogs can learn new tricks. fiat heuristics ruat caelum ~ let heuristics be learned though the heavens fall…because the heavens, big storm track chunks of them anyway, will continue to fall before justice is normatively done, which is to say “never”, since it’s not what the normal distribution mass desires, or ever has….

In 1992 the ATF became concerned over reports of automatic gunfire coming from the Carmel compound. On July 30, ATF agents David Aguilera and Skinner visited the Branch Davidians’ gun dealer Henry McMahon, who tried to get them to talk with Koresh on the phone. Koresh offered to let ATF inspect the Branch Davidians’ weapons and paperwork and asked to speak with Aguilera, but Aguilera declined

Aguilera stated in the affidavit and later testified at trial that a neighbor had heard machine gun fire; however, Aguilera failed to tell the magistrate that the same neighbor had previously reported the noise to the local Waco sheriff, who had already investigated the neighbor’s complaint.

A siege of the “compound,” conducted by agents of the FBI had entered its 51st day. The Federal agents were using heavy battle tanks called Construction Engineering Vehicles or CEVs to insert CS Gas into the rickety wooden structure, and still the occupants, some eighty plus, men, women and seventeen children, would not come out and surrender to the authorities.

As the morning progressed, the CEV’s had begun tearing the building down. They drove the huge armored vehicles directly into the interior, collapsing large portions of the walls and roof into rubble. One got the impression that the drivers of the vehicles and their bosses were really angry about something.

Fifty-one days earlier, the BATF had attempted to conduct a raid at the Davidian’s residence so as to serve arrest warrants on two of the one hundred and forty current residences. The BATF had almost one hundred, heavily armed agents dressed in black raid suits, carrying M-16 and MP-5 machine guns, and 12 gage shotguns. There were snipers with .308 rifles on the perimeters. Although heavily armed, the BATF wasn’t expecting the kind of reaction to their massive presence they received when they approached the Davidians home to serve their warrants. The fatal flaw in the BATF’s plan was that they had lost the element of surprise and the leaders of the raid decided to go for it anyway. After all, who would be foolish enough to resist such a sizable force?

That morning, February 28, 1993 when the BATF approached the front door screaming and yelling, the leader of the Davidians , David Koresh, came to the door, unarmed – holding his empty hands up for all to see and said, “Hey wait a minute, there’s women and children inside – Let’s talk!” At that moment the Davidian’s half dozen young Malamute dogs kept next to the front porch, saw their owner at the door and made a show of aggression against the interlopers. The agents were fending them off with CO2 fire extinguishers. The dogs were backing the agents away from their objective so an agent leading the team drew his side arm and began shooting the dogs. At the first shot, everyone, BATF agents, and defending Davidians heard the shots and the fight was on! Gun fire erupted everywhere. Koresh was wounded in the hand and side for his attempt to prevent the shoot-out that followed. It lasted more than two hours and became the longest shoot-out in Federal Law enforcement history. When a cease-fire was finally established there were six dead Davidians, four dead federal agents, several wounded Davidans and twenty-one wounded BATF personnel. It was one big mess and the Davidians watched as the BATF people eventually withdrew, carrying their dead and wounded with them. The FBI took over that afternoon and secured the perimeter with one hundred and forty Davidians, men, women and children, still inside Mt. Carmel. Later that day, a Davidian who heard about the shoot-out while he was away at work was shot and killed as he attempted to return to home and family, while penetrating the BATF perimeter on foot.

Punish any who Ques?ion authority; Reward all who Exc!amate authority. -^- Cl0\/er’s Creed -^- I believe in one Zod, state Father Almighty…

Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) was a German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor. Although he was a national conservative and initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler, he became one of the founders of the Confessing Church, which opposed the nazification of German Protestant churches.

He vehemently opposed the Nazis’ Aryan Paragraph. For his opposition to the Nazis’ state control of the churches, Niemöller was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1937 to 1945. He narrowly escaped execution and survived imprisonment. After his imprisonment, he expressed his deep regret about not having done enough to help the victims of the Nazis. He turned away from his earlier nationalistic beliefs and was one of the initiators of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt.

He was a vocal pacifist and anti-war activist, and vice-chair of War Resisters’ International from 1966 to 1972.

Arrested on 1 July 1937, Niemöller was brought to a “Special Court” on 2 March 1938 to be tried for activities against the State. He was fined 2,000 Reichmarks and received a prison term of seven months. As his detention period exceeded the jail term, he was released by the Court after the trial. However, immediately after leaving the Court, he was rearrested by Himmler’s Gestapo–presumably because Rudolf Hess found the sentence too lenient and decided to take “merciless action” against him.

Clover is a self-hater. She forfeited her individual identity at a young age as a desperate self-defense mechanism in order to continue to function, albeit only as a drone of a system of violence.

Clover gloats when discussing the violence her system does to other’s identities, because she herself is a Pyrrhic survivor of that same violence.

“Lo fei gibetto de le mei case.” I made my own home be my gallows.” – Hannibal Lecter: Hannibal

There is always a chance Clover will repair her damage, see who her true enemies are, and begin to live her life for herself and not demand others be forced to live for the violent system she delusionally calls home.

Internet=Twilight Zone? – a dimension of sight – sound – and mind…
There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the sunlight of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination…
You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas; you’ve just crossed over into the an area which we call the Twilight Zone.

The dear leaders of our world are the coxswains, the coxmen. They sit at the front of the boats barking orders while nationslaves row. That is what is meant by the human race. Except for the odd anarchist or libertarian, the meaning of your life is to row. To elect the best men to be your coxmen.

The dear leaders have raised armies and societies overwhelming made of useless coxmen. Armies face us with guns, commanding us to row. Armies fill the seats with obedient clovers each with less knowledge or ability to row than the last. All they see is the grand race, they consider the boats, the oars, and the condition of their rowers as irrelevant.

Sadly our grandfathers built the boats. Our fathers handcrafted the oars. They thought they were being good men, by explaining the sacred

Clovers are coxmen wannabes. Coxswain aficionados. Mewling coxlovers enjoying a free boat ride they think never ends. All their dreams are of how they will one day be the cox.

There are many ways to defeat you. One way is to push all the coxmen out of our boats.

Second way is to throw all the oars in the water.

Third way is to jump in the water and leave the boats to the coxmen and you worthless clovers. We have the courage and knowledge to swim to safety that you lack.

Clovers and coxmen will always be at the mercy of the boat makers, oars makers, and strong skilled rowers.

Dial it down and learn your place in the world or get ready for an oar upside your fat head. Prepare for painful death and in the rapids that are just around the bend, eager to smash your hijacked boats into smithereens.

You clovers know you’re up SHTF creek, and you know we’re not going to help you paddle this time.
Might want to shut your mouths and learn something about rowing, before your time runs out.

Maybe you-re looking at a can of beer. Consider it a vessel, a boat that men had to design, construct, and fill with your beverage. And then they had to find rowers to get the beer to you. That is what matters in the world.

Perhaps 99% of the people involved in getting that can of beer in your hand are useless coxswains of some kind or another. They don’t matter. They should be disregarded and never thought of. Throw the coxswains overboard. Throw them all in the woods. Throw the coxswains out of your life. Never be a worthless maggot that sits and watches other men doing work, and has the black-bugged soul to bark and curse at them in addition to contributing nothing to their endeavour.

“Sadly our grandfathers built the boats. Our fathers handcrafted the oars. They thought they were being good men, by explaining the sacred”… process of rowing for the national team.

Perhaps there is a time and a place where it is a good and noble calling to be a coxswain. That place is not here. That time is not now. We need to get back to the root of the root. The origin of our origins.

We need to build things that take us places. Or we should be appreciative spectators cheering those who do things onward.

If you find yourself opening your mouth to tell another man how to row, or when to row, or where to row, do yourself a favor and shut yourself the hell up!

I would never tell any individual to do any specific thing. I mean this only as take it, leave it, ridicule it, improve it, general case whatever. Anyone engaging in government cosplay is my enemy, but due to live and let live, I hate him from afar.

Instead of various attacks and bargainings, of longwinded discussions and findings of virtuous honest men to be in charge of rice cookery to be adminstrators and efficient bureaucrats.

Ghandi to me is like MLK. He won some freedom and entitlements for a whole class of people. Good for him, I don’t fault his accomplishment. I am however 100% opposed to both Ghandi and MLK’s assertion that people should take the world as it is and put their fate at the mercy of the creator or mother nature. That’s insane.

90% of what Ghandi said and did was awesome, but the 10% where he was wrong, if not corrected, leads to a greater disaster than we have now. Here’s his quote

“As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world – that is the myth of the atomic age – as in being able to remake ourselves.”
-M Gandhi

That quote is wrong. They are both different facets of human greatness, not an instance of an either or choice.
Nuclear power is not a myth. Fuck you Gandhi, you pompous urine-drinking bed-sheet-wearing puritanical wog puppet.

in context of gandhi’s stance on non-violence, its probably safe to assume atomic remaking of the world refers to offensive military power rather than electricity to power your computer (& posts). and even if that assumption is incorrect as to gandhi’s meaning, the sentence certainly can be read as containing that correct message.*

didn’t i read a suggestion from you that kudos & honors be attributable to the individuals responsible & not subsumed by the arbitrary & undeserving nationalities they were born into? doesn’t that logic, which i agree with, apply to the species, too? “human” greatness? species manifest destiny? fiat/specious specie, that. and in context of what you wrote before, probably not what you meant. you probably meant

One thing I forgot to add is that people have to stop begging “permission” to do what they know needs to be done. That in itself is a sign of intellectual and cultural group-think that’s been infecting this world for generations now. It’s inculcated in the skrools and reinforced in corporate America as elsewhere. Thinking outside the box is considered bold and innovative and yet ridiculed and even suppressed. When someone throws up a mental or conversational roadblock and says “That’s just the way it is”… I reply, “Says WHO? You? The guy down the street? Just where in the hell does that idea spring from? Do you even know?”

I spend time online in space forums discussing various amateur ideas, concepts, know hows, protocols, and production prototypes.

But everywhere is infested with moderators, and anti-tech trolls, and maundy musers of what is NASA ESA JAXA ROSCOSMOS going to do. How do we petition, how do we increase tax. Which Megacorp is serious and deserves state funding.

What will be the laws in space. How will the UN administer space, what new treaties are needed. We can’t go to Mars yet, we haven’t done enough studies. Who is responsible for injuries and deaths in space. What about space crime and space disease? What if a rare endangered microbe should be found. We must be ready to scurry home then, and leave Mars to the native Martians.

Even if by some miracle, a few people get off this planet, the bleating herds will not rest until everything is surrounded by fences, that all are branded, gelded, tagged, milked, sheared, and yoked so we can all gather to sing Beasts of England every Sunday, Payday, and Military Holiday.

“Bright will shine the fields of England,
Purer shall its waters be,
Sweeter yet shall blow its breezes
On the day that sets us free.
For that day we all must labour,
Though we die before it break;
Cows and horses, geese and turkeys,
All must toil for freedom’s sake.
Beasts of England, Beasts of Ireland,
Beasts of every land and clime,
Hearken well, and spread my tidings
Of the Golden future time.”

An alien visits the earth. He says they’ve come as friends, and they desire to help the earth and set up reciprocal visits to their planet. The aliens have noticed that the earth is plagued by both natural and un-natural calamities, and they only wish to help. They offer a new power source, an end to famine, and a force field to be used as a defense shield. The alien states, “We wish only that you simply trust us.” As he departs, he leaves a book behind.

Later the title of the book has been deciphered. The title reads To Serve Man.The countries of the world offer their thanks as deserts become gardens and armies are disbanded.

Next we see people standing in line to board spaceships as the reciprocal flights to the Alien’s planet begin. They are weighed upon entry, and speak of upcoming events as we would speak before embarking on a vacation.

A woman rushes up desperately trying to get attention. As she is held back by the Aliens, she warns, “Don’t get on the ship! The book, To Serve Man, IT IS A COOKBOOK!” A struggling man is forced into the ship. He is taken to a solitary room. He is offered a meal, but he tosses it on the floor. An Alien enters the room, picks up the meal, and gives it to him stating, “Eat. We would not want you to lose weight.”

The man faces the camera and speaks directly to us.

“Whether we are on the ship with him or back on earth, it does not matter; we will all be on the menu.
Twilight Zone (1962)

Baku, Fineko/abc.az. “With a subtle motion of the hand” China took away the Turkmenistan – Afghanistan – Pakistan – India (TAPI) pipeline project from USA and became yesterday the chief controller of gas resources in Central and South Asia…

Just back from a Clemson (SC) football game, where the loathsome Lindsay Graham made an appearance on the field and was presented with some kind of award. As the announcer reeled off the Senator’s “accomplishments” in the “War on Terror,” there was quite a bit of booing (including some from yours truly). It was interesting and heartening. I’ve become increasingly turned off by the compulsory patriotism at college sporting events, and Clemson is about as patriotic as it gets. But it seems the idea is getting out there that maybe, just maybe, war isn’t always the answer. It’s not much, but it’s progress, I think.

John Kerry, who supposedly attained his claim to fame by fighting against the Vietnam war (which was a heinous atrocity and terror attack on the part of the US) is now sitting in almost the same room and arguing for the exact thing he said he was fighting against in Vietnam.

Notice in the first photo how people were cheering and in the second photo how outright embarrassed they all look. And, that’s ignoring that the probable cause for Kerry’s rebuttal of the Vietnam war in the first place was likely because he didn’t want to be sent off as cannon fodder… but he is now the prime salesman for such a thing.

Yes, Peter King is also awful — reptilian is a good description, Eric. Another poisonous reptile of the same species: the cadaverous John McCain.

And “self-promoting sissy” is perfect for Graham, Ed. He’s the consummate mama’s boy. His mother probably dressed him in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit for his first day of school, resulting in cruel mocking from his classmates. He’s been taking it out on the rest of us ever since.

Among people who deal in actual, physical gold, there’s a little open secret:

Nobody, as in nobody or group of bodies, in the world has the foggiest fucking clue how much refined gold exists.

Humans have been finding, mining and refining gold for several thousand years. Records kept of this activity are generally non-existent. Only relatively recently have any records been kept of the amount of gold used for coining money, and those records are not to be taken seriously because there’s simply no way of verifying them. This doesn’t even take into account the actual amount of gold used for jewelry and other decorative items or kept as refined bullion for savings by individuals, and both those practices have always far exceeded the amount coined for use as money.

The Imperial Japanese Army was directed to sweep up the physical gold of all the Asian countries invaded from 1895 until the fall of the empire. During the 30’s and early ’40s alone, Imperial records show that the amount of gold amassed by the Japanese military and shipped to the Phillipines and back to Japan far exceeded the figure you quoted for the total mount of refined gold in existence on Earth today. Bear in mind that Imperial records were likely understated by those amassing the gold for the Emperor. Everyone can be expected to pinch a little when it comes to gold acquired illegally.

Mind, the Japanese military never confiscated the gold held in Europe, Africa or the Americas, so the Japanese robbery, totalling more than is claimed to exist worldwide today, came from Asia alone and not even the entire continent, at that. That’s from one continent out of five.

The figures bandied about these days for the total amount of refined gold in existence are simply snatched out of thin air. They are bullshit, in other words. The amount of refined gold in existence on Earth is unknown and unknowable.

However, the practice of claiming such a small amount of refined gold exists is good for propaganda purposes. It makes the market value of gold easier to establish (and manipulate) and reinforces the argument that a gold standard can’t work because there’s too little in existence for everyone to have even a little.

Further, no mention is usually made (by the figure-snatchers) of the enormous amount of unrefined gold that exists in the form of saved nuggets and of jewelry and other items made from unrefined gold panned from rivers and streams. Such “virgin gold” from sources all over the world exists and enters the market as scrap all the time. It’s impossible to guess how much virgin gold there is above ground, held in private hands and unreported to anyone.

Please excuse the interruption. Gold is a favorite subject of mine and I’m prone to outbursts.

Wow Ed. What if the absolute wealthiest on the planet have been rehypothicating the real gold, now stored under their control, and replaced it with paper promises. Removed and replaced in non-viewable central bank and TBTF institutions now holding worthless IOU paper, that will be defaulted on at the right time.? When the paper system crashes they use their “I got gold” collateral to buy up the world at the fire sales?

Bevin. All my pea brain did was realize
(1) Carol Quigley knew what he was talking about (historian for the CFR in USA & Royal Institute for International Affairs [same outfit] in England),
(2) Subsequent “good job” multi multi millionaire businessman Bill Clinton since leaving office,
(3) mix in the immediate aftermath of 911 axis of evil non-compliant countries to be brought into the club by force speech, with the PNAC documented game plan for the USA that we ARE following, and the (4) 2015-2020 time frame of US banking collapse & world wide Bank of International Settlements financial rebuilding under a modified gold standard.

The lead in to your comment was a lot like many comments Jean has made.

I was watchin’ a lame ass film called, The Rose & the Sword.
I was reminded of Jean quite a bit while watching the film.

From now on, whenever I see Jean write, I’ll think of Rutger Howard. … In a multitude of roles. (No insult intended, Jean.)

I have more to say, but I’ll hold my tongue, I don’t want to piss off the cool guys here more than I’ve accidentally done. [Or draw attention of the asshole NSA.]

Another thing I can’t hold myself back from saying, I feel like I’m in good company, I noticed SHTFPLAN showcased this thread. In a comment there I noticed a character called, Durango (Krugman) Kidd said eric was an idiot.

You guys don’t know how many times that block head called me the same for promoting the free market and liberty.

I’m sort of in awe that our enemies herald me in the same way as they do eric. It’s like a freakin’ medal of honor.

We drive the protectionist defenders of empire crazy. Er, I mean, we drive them bat-shit fucking crazy man! If you stood next to them you’d be hit by spittle.
Ha.

@Downshift said: Another thing I can’t hold myself back from saying, I feel like I’m in good company, I noticed SHTFPLAN showcased this thread. In a comment there I noticed a character called, Durango (Krugman) Kidd said eric was an idiot.

Remember what the senior WWII bomber pilot told their younger newbie who asked how he knew when he was over the target, “when they start shooting at us”.

Bevin, the first thing I thought when I read about the German gold was that the gold wasn’t there to be returned. The most ridiculous term used by Fed functionaries is “gold leasing”. What they are actually doing is selling off bullion deposits that are entrusted to them, but they refer to the transaction as a “lease”, implying that the bullion is still in their possession.

Probably, the bullion of the various national banks at the NYC Fed has been sold off under the guise of leasing it to whomever.

One thing is certain; bankers view deposits as their property and are loathe to allow the depositors to have it back, whether it’s bullion or fiat paper.

This is the conclusion you would draw if someone who was “holding on to something for you” offered a bunch of excuses why he couldn’t produce the thing immediately.

Why would it be any different between gubmints?

If anything, the suspicion that something was amiss would be far stronger, given the fundamental nature of gubmints.

I found this damning info online.

Christof Lehmann (nsnbc),- Nobody wants to admit it openly. The German Gold Reserves in the United States are gone, used for financing the United States war chest and “Global Full Spectrum Dominance”.

So why is even the German Federal Bank trying to avoid further speculation by referring to non-existent “full transparency”?

The answer is quite simple. Nobody wants the current backwardation of the gold market to turn into a permanent backwardation of the gold market. The consequence would be the inevitable collapse of global trade and civilization as we know it.

In April 2013, nsnbc international published a report by Prof. Long Xinming, revealing that the German government had asked to visit the vaults of the US Federal Reserve to determine the actual existence of the German gold reserves.

Germany deposited about half of its gold reserves in the USA. The FED refused to permit Germany to examine its own gold, stating “security” and “no room for visitors” as reasons. Nothing else.

When Germany was finally “permitted” an audit, the auditors were admitted into the vault′s antechamber where five or six gold bars were shown to them as “representative of Germany′s holdings”.

The German auditors returned a second time, when the FED granted them permission to “look into” one of nine rooms without allowing them to enter or touch the gold. The auditors were then sent back home to Germany. The report on nsnbc prompted worldwide discussions.

In July 2013, American hedge-fund manager William Kaye created a stir when he picked up the ball, stating:

“Germany won′t ever see its gold again… Central Banks, such as the FED, where most of the reserves had been deposited, lent the gold to U.S. Banks such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan.

The gold has been used in the market to lower the gold price and the FED has received securities in exchange… Germany won′t ever see that gold again, because it is safely kept in my accounts and the accounts of our investors”.

There is no gold in those vaults I also agree. I sure understand why people buy gold and precious metals, although me myself I don’t buy precious metals. I see no point as doing so will do nothing but get your stash confiscated either by the electorate, theives, or the government scammers. Its the right strategy however if the world was a bit more sane and less corrupt. Though if that were the case then we wouldn’t need metals to back our money. Don’t get me wrong I do believe the true money is gold, but again its not worth getting oneself killed? What good will gold do a person when the government outlaws it and tells you turn it in or go to jail? Sure you could bury it but then its illiquid money. So I do believe in having something for barter in case of a melt down. For me that is boxes and boxes full of 1 quart motor oil and a couple cases of shot gun shells. I’ve also thought of loading up on laundry detergent. The truth is that those reserves wouldn’t get me by for long, but then again I don’t plan to wait it out in a city or even the U.S. if things go to hell. In fact my wife and I were talking about this just recently. It seems to me that United States has commited so many wrongs in the world that its almost our destiny to be fully nuked. Chile looks like the bright spot in the world to me, just need to keep the business growing outwards here so that the transistion is even better there. I like you didn’t sow all the discord of war over there and I plan not to reap it here either if possible.

As far as investments in the America, I tried the stock market and found that was ran by a den of theives. Never do that one either. The only answer is to build ones own technology company. Make yourself the only shareholder. Reinvest most of the profits. Keep all the complex stuff (intellectual property) to oneself, hire cheap labor to do the hard work but keep intellectual step the last stage to oneself. Its very crucial to control your workers ability to compete against you, as its not just their morals at risk but also those who can compel them under force to displace you as owner too.

I know I’m probably going to make some people upset with me on my statements about gold and intellectual property. But to me its impossible to hold on to either one long haul. Though I like the idea that intellectual property (that is complex things taking a lot of man hours to duplicate) is a natural barrier to competition (because most people are crooks and lazy) and by crimping the supply side results in more profit so a small guy can become a 10,000 pound gorilla. Intellectual propety by industrial secrets works too or else Coca Cola secret recipe wouldn’t have made them so big, before everyone guessed the secret. To me starting ones own company and keeping it simple reinvesting all the profits is the only answer. Gold is really an investment for a guy that can’t think how to make a real product. Most everyone in this room I think is going to be a lot more smarter than needing all their eggs in a gold carton. Yeah gold should be the people’s money, because the average clown isn’t going to know how to make money off his money. Stock market again is a joke, the best investment is in oneself and this country is a contrarian and ripe for manufacturing though not in the conventional sense as the parasites are still huge here. Buffet in my opinion is right about gold just sitting there in a vault, but he uses that to tell the average baffoon to invest in the stock market which is a sham. Only invest in yourself. Always be the only owner in the company you produce. Reinvest the profits back in the company to keep the tax bill down. Expand the company across as many different markets as possible to diversify. Make all intellectual property of the company inaccessible to the common workers there. The last statement is a poison pill for any criminal minded that think of pirating your company. In the end gold is nice if you got some extra cash that you don’t know what to do with, but its most likely to be stolen or get you killed in my opinion. Production is the only real wealth that matters, but getting it to be yours on main street and not Wall Street’s is another issue altogether.

Years ago when I decided that I wasn’t the “employee type”, I started into business for myself. My most dearly held principles were to never borrow money and never hire anyone.

A friend of mine told me that was absurd and that I needed to use “other people’s money” in order to avoid risking my own. He also said that I would need employees because “there aren’t enough hours in the day for you to do all the work.”

He said, “You’ll never do any big business without loans and employees”.. My answer was: So?

I don’t do big business, but I do enough to pay my own way. Also, I don’t owe anyone for anything I have, though I have everything I need to do the business I do. I don’t depend on anyone to do anything related to my business so I can’t be torpedoed by someone else’s mistake.

Yeah I’ve been busy rotating the crops and visiting certain family who has came and visited us. Life is going good. Some time ago I did tell you guys that I saw an uptick in one of my business lines that was office equipment. Thereafter the stock market went crazy with all kinds of gracious promises that the recession was over, the money printing had paid off so they had thought. On the other hand people like you and I knew it was just a temporary high of money printing. Well that business has noticeble slackened off this last month. So inversely I’m thinking that Faber is right and we are probably going to see a big correction coming this next few months. I’m bracing for impact, the fortunate thing is that being an Austrian producer has helped me see the longer trends. I’ve walk the walk of the talk I talk. I did spread myself out in business over a large diversified plane that where one product line is petering out others are making up for it. Up to this point its a net neutral, so I’ve been even more radical at tossing more things out there on the free market to overcome the normal business dulldrums that will most likely occur. I read something on another site commentary that I thought was true. I repeat it here and paraphrase, that what is coming in the U.S. will be a curse for men that made more than what they were worth and ultimately will be a blessing for those that haven’t. Bring it on! I’m going to get my Godly promise and blessing. Those on this site should be more than millionares, should be billionares.

But its a fine balance between making it big (thus supporting everyone else) and having fun with tossing thoughts to other geniuses on this site. As Bevin a genius rightfully predicts its a bit addicting, a rotation is necessary.

You guys keep up the good work in all aspects, I’ll be checking in periodically to recharge.

Everyone here (regulars) seems to have taken some precautionary steps. If only we were all in the same county – we’d have a viable Galt’s Gulch!

I’ve been working like a Ritalin-popping Beaver on transforming what was originally a two-story kennel building on our property into a nice little guesthouse. It’s been a big project, but I am now over the hump – I think.

I had to replace one wall (a 3 ton floor jack and some 4x4s propped the house up while I did this) due to carpenter ants. New roof/with two skylights. Repair/paint the exterior siding. Install six new double-insulated windows. Pour slab for entryway. New entry door. Replace/relocate existing stairs to second level. Update the electric to 100 amp service. Wire house w/new outlets and recessed lighting. Install AC unit in wall upstairs. New insulation; exterior soffet vents, etc Get the whole place drywalled. Paint the interior. Lots of custom woodwork inside; hand-done by me – and stained by me.

The upstairs is now basically finished except for carpet/baseboard trim – and furniture.

This fall/winter I plan to:

Install stainless steel chimney liner; buy a replacement (nice) wood stove. Do the stonework on the floor/wall around the stove. Install wainscoating (sp?) trim around the perimeter of the first level.

Though I call it a guesthouse, the truth is this building could also be a display/contemplation area for classic motorcycles. I could place five on the first level, with seating for long-term viewing. Naturlich, there will be a refrigerator and access to appropriate refreshment.

Gold Silver Worlds: China just released their latest gold import figures for the month of July. China imported through Hong Kong 116.4 tonnes of physical gold in July of 2013. That figure comes on top of the 517.92 tonnes of gold imports in the first 6 months of this year. In total, between January and July of this year, China imported a staggering 633.94 tonnes of physical gold. The country is indeed on its way to reach 1,000 tonnes of imports over the whole year, as forecasted by the World Gold Council in their Q2 gold demand report.

To put this figure into perspective: the largest gold fund available to Western investors (the GLD) today is backing it’s paper with 919 tonnes of physical gold. GLD is by far the largest gold ETF. China on its own has imported 2/3d of that in the first 7 months of this year.

@Eric
“If only we were all in the same county – we’d have a viable Galt’s Gulch!”

I know but if we concentrated then it would be all the easier to Waco us in the end. As we know government likes highly organized and hierachy concentrates to smack down, its probably for the better that we are all dispersed sowing the message they don’t want told to everyone and everywhere.

Though I must admit that sounds like nice handiwork your completing on the house and it would be nice to chat someday seeing your garage and sharing a beer.

You know I was watching an love it or leave it show with my mother in law last night. There was a particular sloppy male homeowner that had let his place go to hell for 30 years. And I was telling my mother in law that is just plain wrong. You know when a man is productive and affluent in life it shows in all aspects of his life. Its ok to be poor in money, but one should then step up to the plate of fixing his own stuff. If you work for better opportunity cost, then of course pay for it out of the wages for someone better in division of labor. But the average guy just simply sits and wants someone else to do all the working and thinking for him, he takes the shortest path to ground. Its a shame too because sometimes climbing an out of the way summit leads one to see much farther, though the averages would rather stay in the valley eating the bannanas.

Anyway, I realize I have no right to judge other people’s lives. Yet the lazy sickness is everywhere.

Along this same line, if you are going to invest in gold, take actual possession of the stuff and don’t accept paperwork saying you “own” X weight of gold in lieu of physical possession. The risk of scamming or, say, government diversion is too great.

A few years ago I heard of one case in which some business was selling gold via paper shares, without actually handing over any actual gold to investors. Some time later the business shut down, the proprietor became unavailable to his investors, and authorities entered the storage facility where all this precious metal supposedly was held. You guessed it, nothing but a dusty empty space that had obviously never contained any gold. Don’t know the outcome of the case—whether authorities busted the perp—but his customers undoubtedly never will be made whole.

The default on giving people their “physical” gold has happened recently by a very large institution, and in the MF Global collapse. They got paper money, if anything, back instead. Sorry no gold for you, even though you “thought” you had some here in our lovely terrazzo floored vaults. Ha ha ha.

Without someone possessing the physical collateral (gold) the plan would not work:

“The Power of financial capitalism had [a] far reaching plan, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.
This system was to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences.

“The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks, which were themselves private corporations.

Each central bank sought to dominate its government by its ability to control treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence co-operative politicians by subsequent rewards in the business world.”

That’s exactly right, ek. If you don’t get the gold when you hand over the money, you haven’t bought gold at all, you’ve just been conned.

An awful lot of the gold market consists of con jobbers selling gold they don’t have. The COMEX is founded on this con: investment firms shuffling paper and calling it a metals market. That’s what is behind the raid on gold prices that started in April.

A gang of thieves (the larger investment banks) who had no gold to sell sold contracts to deliver gold that they will not ever be able to deliver. They’ll offer the central banks in China and India cash settlement once they’ve run out their string and have no means of extending the contracts. They’ll also want a bailout from the Fed.

rand’s galt’s gulch was deus ex machina. dependent on that mirage shield overhead. not to mention an invite. a real top-down solution. the heroic control freakdom vs the 2nd-rater control freakdom. without that dome, you’re gonna be dry-gulched…maybe even with that dome, inside job style.

bottom up, as i think has been mentioned around here, would mean self-invitation. its your party & you can go, if you want to. see who else is there when you get there. see what self-organizes. like your cutting edge ancestors did. and no holographic camouflage required.

jeremiah johnson invited himself to the mountains, & jeremiad johnson stayed home, waiting for the mountains to come to him*….

*Mahomet made the people believe that he would call a hill to him, and from the top of it offer up his prayers, for the observers of his law. The people assembled; Mahomet called the hill to come to him, again and again; and when the hill stood still, he was never a whit abashed, but said, If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill.[1]

Ozy. Well yes on the details of the gulch, but we have to remember it was written before the first ever satellite was launched by USSR, ten years before the first mainstream mention of a hand-held phone like device (Dick Tracy excepted), and we had to wait 2 minutes for the vacuum tubes to warm up in our AM/FM radios. So I cut her some slack there.

As I recall there was only 1 or 2 rules to live in the gulch, no building codes or police, dirt cheap electricity and a pretty good division of goods and services we all kinda like.

The hermit thing is not that attractive come winter, unless you are trapping for pelts.

gary…scarcity is still with us, so i prefer to spend, or bet, my benefits on the least doubtful propositions.

the hermetic option is but one (even in the movie). but i think there’s more than a little to pascal’s, “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” (funny: pascal took the wrong side of his wager. but that’s another story.) roomatology is one of those physician heal thyself deals, tho, & hardly subject to will at all; its mostly luck of the draws, & rare, as hands go.

Good catch, Gary. Import activity in one country, with one central bank, reporting such large numbers in a short time period is significant. If we assume that there is even a small percentage of unrecorded, unobserved “sweeping” of alloyed gold being refined for (or by) private owners, there’s a lot of gold out there in the world.

That sweeping activity has always been part of the American scene, but it really expanded since the big rise in gold prices in ’07 & ’08. In Asia during the time of the Japanese empire’s sweeping program, drug production by Imperially sanctioned enterprises such as Yakuza played a role in the sweeping up of privately held gold.

That reminds of a saying: “You can shear a sheep over and over, but you can only skin him once”.

The PTB seem to be about to start skinning. Sweeping up the gold is an end-stage step in the process. It wasn’t really accomplished with FDR’s robbery of ’33. It’s definitely happening now.

Confiscation would cost them their cover, but outlawing drugs creates a large criminal class of addicts and sellers. It makes it possible for the enforcers to control drug availability to an extent.

High bullion prices encourage theft by addicts, who sell stolen jewelry cheap to get their drugs. Another angle is the destruction of areas of the economy which forces gold and other valuables onto the market as people sell off their luxury items to provide for their families when the jobs are gone.

The Japanese occupation of Manchuria used the drug angle to clean up a lot of the alloyed gold, then went to confiscation once the cover wasn’t needed. Today, with more complete control of the economy, confiscation probably won’t be needed until the final stage of the endgame.

Tor, that is not what will blowup the world next time (at the Big Boys request). Look here:

According to the same source, the total notional amount of derivatives held by U.S. commercial banks and savings associations, as of 12/31/12, was a staggering $223 trillion, while the four largest U.S. banks shown above hold 93% of these contracts. To put these overwhelming numbers into perspective, the U.S. economy only generates about $15.5 trillion in gross national product per annum;

No one in the media seems to be asking the obvious question in all this. But what else is new?

A few years ago talk of “peak oil” was all the rage, and I still have qualms about the likelihood that the scenario has merit. But the conventional wisdom of late is that thanks to fracking, other new technologies, new oil fields, and new sources of oil such as shale becoming more economical to exploit, we have gone from a 50–year supply of oil to a 200–year supply.

Except that instead of the expected crash in prices at the news, crude oil prices and futures are just as high as ever. No one is asking, Why are pump prices still well over $3 per gallon in the US? As recently as the fall of 2008, gasoline was well under $2 per gallon after the peak of above $4 that summer.

And that leads to the other question, Just why would gasoline prices necessarily spike at $10+ per gallon after action against Syria? That country has little oil and is about to become a net oil importer anyway if it hasn’t already. Not saying you’re wrong, Eric, but the obvious answer involves the very forces you mention in government. The answer also involves wealthy speculators as in the summer of 2008 who could not care less how everyone else suffers with hyperexpensive fuel.

Another question no one in the media wants to ask: Who should give a rat’s ass if certain Muslims are killing certain other Muslims? If they’re offing each other, at least they aren’t killing people who actually matter and make a positive difference in the world, including peaceful Muslims who want no part of that evil. Yeah, yeah, I know, we “need” to do something about use of chemical weapons. Yeah, sure.

The wars besides being circuses are desperate attempts to maintain solvency, by eliminating competition and strengthening the Fed Bank cartel.

“This is far worse than the great depression. The false risk models, centralization, complexity, and fragility, all point to the world undergoing its worse crisis since the American Revolution.” – N. Taleb & B. Mandelbrot

Actually there was a recent Castle episode where someone had found a “lynchpin” that would cripple the world by igniting WW3.

Had to cause an apparrent assassination attempt to kill a major Chinese Party member’s daughter. (IE, she was the target, as he was an arms dealer and very influential in the Party. The US was to take the blame.)

It’s not about solvency, per se – but about hiding their assets and transforming them into new value stores, so The Elite are unaffected by the coming storm, or even able to (a) profit, (b) consolidate their power.

Our economy is based on DEBT, not value. That fiat currency, it’s meant to be a store of VALUE, but it’s really a measure of debt, termed as “future productivity” – YOUR FUTURE is what’s being mortgaged.

They’ll eat each other, they have no qualms – “In the end, there can be only ONE.” (Idiots)

Problem of being King of the Hill: Everyone wants a piece of you, even those you hire for protection.

What I don’t understand is why does the U.S. think it has to police the world, and spend billions of taxpayer dollars bombing other countries? It can’t be for economic reasons. The U.S. doesn’t even make the top 10 countries with the highest per capita GNP. If you exclude the oil-rich Middle East kingdoms as anomalies, at the top of the per capita list are Luxembourg, Norway, Switzerland, Australia, Denmark, and Sweden. Countries that are not exactly known for warmongering.

What I don’t understand is why does the U.S. think it has to police the world, and spend billions of taxpayer dollars bombing other countries? It can’t be for economic reasons.

Steve, you’re apparently assuming that TPTB do things with the economic best interests of the American nation and its people in mind.

WRONG. They couldn’t give two shits or a damn about America, its economic future, or the well-being of Joe and Jane Sixpack (i.e., you and me and ours).

No, playing the role of “globocop” serves the interests of TPTB themselves, and ONLY them. No one else. It is in the One Percent[TM]’s interests that the UFSA place globocop, even if it’s at the expense of the 99 percent. That’s all that has ever mattered to TPTB and all that ever will matter.

Bevin,
You forget their MOST IMPORTANT mandate.
Not money, that’s the side effect.
Not even power – that is also a side effect, or maybe secondary motive.

CONTROL. Divide and conquer. People at each other’s throats don’t talk to each other very well.
NAP would allow for greater wealth – but somethign NEW or BETTER will come along, word will get out – they lose all their power and wealth. Can’t have THAT. No NEW oligarchs or aristocrats are allowed! (They probably learned that when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs became players. Prior to that, there seems to have been a less myopic view, or perhaps it was just a more public scheme – Monopoly, Trust, etc. computers were unknown, and the concepts behind them, the speed and capacity to influence and change the world – sure that wasn’t on anyone’s radar. Now the laws ahve been adulterated, especially WRT patent and Intellectual Property.)
But now? No, they’ll co-opt or buy out any threats. You’re allowed to have money, but not to join the Elite. (Michael G. Rubin comes to mind, founder of GSI – Global Sports Interactive, now bought out by ebay. To them, he’s Nouveau Riche, just an upstart from the Great Unwashed. I worked there, BTW, but never met him.)

First off, War is good for invention. I’ll state that as fact – Radar, Aircraft, sonar, submarines, lasers, power systems, fuel refinement – all got at least a major boost from wartime activities.

HOWEVER, there’s a serious deviation between THAT type of WAR, and the endless messes we insert ourselves into since that time period (WW1 and WW2.)

The problem is: We ARE trying to police the world.
I don’t understand WHY – I guess it’s PROFITABLE? Cost the country a few billion and a few thousand casualties, all of whom are recurring profits down the road – for drugs, therapy, medical costs, etc?

Having said that first paragraph, too – the scheme there (in war) was to profit, but for a reason. Once the REASON went away, the military-industrial complex didn’t like losing their goose that laid the golden egg – so they found ways to generate NEW geese. War on Drugs. WAR on Poverty. WAR on Terror (closest to the original). Racism falls in there, too.
But there’s no REAL opposing power any more – so, instead of two unified forces pushing (motivating) each other, one is trying to smother / squash the other using superior firepower (always a losing prospect, BTW), and the other just fans out, and accepts there will be losses – they don’t HAVE an “R&D” department, they have expendable labor (and take care of the labor’s families). It’s a war of attrition, and THEY have better resources than WE do. So there’s only decay, no improvement.

And that sort of war ALSO does nothing for the GDP. No need to increase GDP, it’s sledgehammering a fly. Fly usually gets away.
Add in that the fly and the hammer have a deal going on, and it’s a foregone conclusion that the REST of us are going to get damaged, while the fly and hammer do their little dance…

Lastly, you get a better SOCIETY (cohesive whole) wihtout endless conflict, and THIS TPTB CANNOT ALLOW. We’d wise up real fast and deal with the REAL problems – LEO, Laws, etc – And THAT is terrifying, because TPTB ARE the problem. So the foment problems and issues and distractions at home.

Eventually even that runs out, and the rats flee the sinking ship – and drown.

Downshift, here is the 1997-2000 written road map (minus the fine details) of which countries must be taken out. So far they are 4 for 7 (as I recall from memory, which could be wrong). Syria would make 5.

One of the things I find most telling is how they act as if this will be a few strikes to punish Assad and that is all. There is an arrogance here that is hard to fathom. The fact is that they have no idea what will happen. Eric makes a good case that they have a plan and that they are sticking to it. I agree but I have also been to war and I know exactly how long a plan lasts. It lasts up until the first shot is fired and after that all bets are off. If our media wanted to they could have people buying backyard bunkers and stocking up right now by claiming that Russia might nuke us over this. In fact there is no reason to believe that this game of brinksmanship is any less dangerous than the Cuban missile crisis. Russia doesn’t have to allow this and if the US strikes without the UN security council approving it, it’s an illegal under international law. Russia could very easily take out an entire battle group and what could we do but arm the nukes? One “stray” missile like the one that hit the Chinese embassy could start WWIII. Yet they act as if this is less dangerous than a walk in the park.

As for why the war. Well Syria is part of the Axis of evil right? These guys laid out their plans and wrote it down for people to read. What more does anyone need other than the ability to read to see what they are up to? It’s all about hegemony and it has been for decades. WWIII will be fought over energy reserves and this could set it off. Yet there is not a peep about that possibility in the press or from any member of congress.

I agree that they would love for gas to be $10 a gallon as long as they are in control of it. But at the end of the day there are other actors who might have something to say about it.

I hope this is genuine, but I’m skeptical. There’s a looooong history of media types on the right “going ‘libertarian'” (note the quotes around the last word, just to emphasize my skepticism) when they get fed up with the Rethuglicans, only for them to “kiss and make up” in the end and go right back to being the freedom-hating, state-worshiping, warmongers that they’ve been all along (for the ultimate pseudo-libertarian, I use Neal Boortz as ab template).

I believe the bridges were burned and dynamited from the other end – though perhaps you mean, you intentionally burned a few?
Dempublican or Reprocrat: the parties have moved away from what it means to be an American.

We should… Remind them.
I hear there’s a special on Sarin Gas right now, just have to go pick it up…

Oh, I wasn’t thinking of you, Eric. Even back your WashTimes days, I remember thinking, after reading your columns, “how long is this guy with libertarian leanings going to last in this neocon journalistic shit hole?”

Those lucky enough to have met Joe Sobran before he died will invariably telly you what a nice guy he was. Unpretentious, a bit disheveled. A “regular guy” who also happened to be brilliant. What they did to him was unspeakably vile.

One Joe Sobran was worth a bucketfull of William F. Buckleys – and a dump-truck load of Tucker Carlsons.

Big Joe: Look, Mac, you and us? We’re just soldiers, right? We don’t even know what this war’s all about. All we do is we fight and we die and for what? We don’t get anything out of it. In about a half an hour the whole American army’s gonna be comin’ down that road. Why don’t you do yourself a great, big fat favor, huh? And get the hell outta here?

German tank commander: I have orders. This bank isn’t to fall into the hands of the American army.

Kelly: Sergeant, this bank’s not gonna fall into the hands of the American army. It’s gonna fall in our hands. You see, we’re just a private enterprise operation.

When I think back on formative influences – things that got me to thinking – I must include movies such as this one. It was a very subversive movie – in the spirit of Bugs Bunny: The system is full of shit; laugh in its face – evade it, flummox it.

I found myself cheering the soliders (both sides), sharing their delight at beating The Man.

I think that is a sign of too many people, and too much “intimacy” (I use the word guardedly, I mean: There is no time or space to find out what you are made of, or what your limits are. You are NEVER alone – the surroundings never silent.)

“The Meaning of Life”, in the Irish Catholic household – remember how people were crammed in?
That’s the plan for all of us, only we won’t be family.

And we won’t EVER be able to know ourselves, either – always a distraction, always noise, always chaos.

I MISS the silence, and I only have one other person at home (usually) and one dog. But they ALWAYS NEED SOMETHING… And she can’t comprehend that I like to be ALONE. (Funny, I’ve told her that for over 7 years. I guess she doesn’t think I’m serious? Gonna be a rude awakening soon. She now has a job, and my job is looking shaky… Might be moving on soon, and this time – I ain’t bringing my problems with me! It’s ALL expendable!)

A couple of things give me a wee bit of hope. The first happened last Thursday. For the first time in over 200 years, the British Parliament voted against a Prime Minister’s war resolution (to support Obama’s desire to wage war against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad). The last time that happened was in 1782, when Parliament voted to stop fighting George Washington and Marquis de Lafayette, granting America its independence. The vote from Parliament will have a huge effect. You can read about it at http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/08/31/Obama-s-Diminishing-Returns

I remain convinced that a war – that an unjustifiable launching of missiles at a sovereign country that did not in any way threaten the US – is so massively unpopular with the general public that its initiation will cut out most if not all remaining political support for the regime in DC. The fact that the regime is fronted by a “liberal” (and peace prize-winning) “anti-war” Democrat will at a stroke de-legitimize not merely him, but his party.

It’s become tragi-comical. No liberal can continue to defend Obomber without looking like a fool – or a tool. Precisely what has already happened to Republicans, post-Chimp.

The system is on its last legs because almost no one – regardless of political affiliation – either trusts or respects it any longer. It is increasingly held in contempt by broad swaths of the public.

If the world doesn’t go up in flames, this could presage an opportunity to create something better once it topples.

“Almost overnight, the cost of food and other necessary staples would triple. Transport would shut down. People in cold areas would face freezing to death in their homes. People in hot areas could no longer afford to run the AC – or the refrigerator.”

I appreciate hyperbole as well as the next guy, but very little electricity is made from petroleum here in the U.S.

And we have plenty of domestic natural gas to heat our homes – at rock-bottom prices too, compared to the rest of the world.

Fuel (from petroleum) is a small component of the price of finished goods – even food – prices wouldn’t triple before stocks sold out if there was a panic.

The biggest risk is an “oil shock” like 1973 that plunges the world back into recession (dropping the price/bbl of oil well below its current $100+), though that would likely require another pan-Arab coordinated boycott of the U.S. (not very likely)

And we have plenty of domestic natural gas to heat our homes – at rock-bottom prices too, compared to the rest of the world.

I have little doubt that those among TPTB causing all of our grief will find a way to engineer a crisis in this market as well when it’s to their advantage to do so, sure to result in unnatural shortages of said product.

William A. Cook: Propelling One Crime Against Humanity To Cause Another – The Logic Of The Pathological Mind

“This (chemical attack in Syria 8/21/2013) is the first use of chemical warfare in the 21st century. It has to be unacceptable, we have to confront something that is a war crime, something that is a crime against humanity. If we don’t do so, then we will have to confront even bigger war crimes in the future.” : William Hague, British Foreign Secretary, 8/28/2013

Unfortunately, tragically, William Hague’s empathy for those mutilated by chemical weapons does not apply to the UK’s allies, the US and Israel, as the heinous picture below attests: the children of Palestine seared to death by white phosphorus during Israel’s savage invasion of Gaza 2008-2009 during the Christmas slaughter of the innocents. How fortunate for William Hague to forget this earlier use of illegal chemical weapons to save embarrassment for his country’s allies while verbally savaging his perceived enemies.

Small Palestinian children burning to death, following the phosphor explosives bombardment by Jewish soldiers on their school.

While the rest of the world debates whether chemical agents were used, what kind were used, and who used them, whether or not this attack should be or must be the determinant of action required because the “red line” has been crossed, whether the west must wait for the UN inspectors to report to their superiors, whether or not we have already acted illegally against International law by arming and training these rebels, or whether there is any known consequences should we attack Syria, one concern, it seems to me, rides high above all others, how can the United States and Israel be the determiners of who will use chemicals of mass destruction since they are culpable of this crime multiple times over in this very century? Witness the bombing of Baghdad, the attempted erasure of Fallujah, again and again, and the US supported invasion of Gaza. How hypocritical of the British Secretary to claim righteousness to invade a sovereign nation when he and his nation have been allies to such mayhem?

Here the righteous stand in all their finery, their striped ties set against the blue pin-striped suits, lashing at the people of the world for not getting upset that they do not want more wars despite the “evidence” that they fail to present, after all they are the government and the people must trust them. Well here is evidence, the picture taken in Gaza and should you have the stomach for it, hundreds of pictures taken as the invasion there unfurled. But there’s more evidence coming right from the perpetrator of this slaughter as reported by Idan Landau:

“It doesn’t photograph well. (the white phosphorus)” In all honesty, the man is right.

Okay, after a while the army did remember that it had been confused, and it did use white phosphorus, but only in open territories and not against people.

Okay, then the IDF remembered that it got it wrong again and that it did use white phosphorus in urban areas. Two hundred bombs, actually. But this was only in order to create a “smoke screen,” and there is nothing wrong with that. And if there was something wrong, it’s insignificant and unintentional, and it would be thoroughly investigated, so that no stone is left unturned.

That’s all well and good, except that at least 12 Gazans met their horrific death this way, burned to death by white phosphorus. Among them were three women, six children and a 15-month-old baby girl. Dozens more suffered burns from the material which continues to burn through flesh and tissue until it reaches the bone. Doctors in Gaza were helpless in treating the unfamiliar burns. Israel didn’t give them time to prepare themselves; white phosphorus shells hit Al-Quds Hospital and completely burned the top two floors.”

There’s the evidence and proof that neither Kerry, Obama, Cameron or Hague can produce. And shouldn’t we be able to see photos taken of this tragic event by phone cameras as happened in Gaza? The allies are those guilty of the use of this horrific weapon but we fail to condemn ourselves and certainly not our “democratic, only friend” in the mid-east, Israel. But why condemn if we control the UN and make it impossible to bring Israel to the international court as the Goldstone Report stated must be done.

And so we continue this inevitable march to disaster granting impunity to the cause, the nation that drew the red line Obama has to address or be unbelievable forever after. How prescient that we provide a point of absolute action that can be used by our own CIA, Mossad, and mercenaries, blame the Syrian government for false flag operations, and attack regardless of truth and evidence to support it. What else justifies the only excuse our governments use to not provide transparent evidence: it can’t be revealed because it would aid the enemy in determining our sources of information.

These facts were already known in the first days of Cast Lead. Human Rights Watch published a thorough investigation – one of the most thorough I have read – of Israel’s use of white phosphorus and its devastating effects. IDF soldiers who took part in the Gaza campaign also testified on the extensive use of white phosphorus, including direct fire on houses suspected of being booby-trapped (and not for masking purposes as the IDF later claimed).

Indeed, the outcome “didn’t photograph well,” and that’s the reason the IDF is parting ways with white phosphorous. Not, god forbid, the hell that Ghada Abu Halima went through from the moment she was burned by white phosphorous and lost five family members, up until her death two and a half agonizing months later. Ghada managed to give her testimony and to have her photo taken, which “didn’t look good,” and “burdened Israeli hasbara [propaganda],” as the Maariv reporter put it.”

Only the “vanquished know war” Chris Hedges weeps, but few will confront the victors that vanquish truth with lies pretending to be civilized. Thus does ignorance and might control our lives.

Why are you guys bothering to reply to this clover fellow? He’s a paid shill. He receives money to argue with you. He/she’s a prostitute. Would you believe a whore who says she loves you? Oh yeah, and put the 50 on the dresser.

Rog, I’ve wondered the same thing. Shills are like stray dogs; feed’em and they stick around. They stick around long enough, they’ll try to bite you.

Those writing these long, earnest replies to the assholes, bear in mind: if the site admin nukes the trolls’ comments, he’ll have a much bigger job to do because he’ll have to also delete your responses. The way the discussion is threaded on this siteware, even a few responses to the trolls disrupts the discussion and forces readers who aren’t interested in it to scroll past the sideshow.

That was an unnecessary dig at Israel (if anything, the poodle, not the dude who’s walking him). Most Israelis don’t relish the thought of missiles landing on them or rockets being launched at them. Since Israel imports all its oil (from guess who?), Israelis — both Jewish and non-Jewish — aren’t looking forward to fifty shekel oil. And the Israeli on the street (the Jewish/European street and the Palestinian/Arab street) have no more to say about what their government does than the average American has.

Also, the current Iranian leadership seems to have learned from the foul-mouthed, ubersturmbann Ahmedinijab that it doesn’t help things to go out of your way, with dumb threats, to drive crazy a people who have good reason to hear in those threats the Horst Wesel echo of “Die Fahne Hoch, das reihen fest geshlossen!”

I have sympathy for individual Israelis who oppose their Dear Leaders’ maniacal policies. However, I have none for the Dear Leadership of Israel – worse maniacs than ours, even – nor for the Israeli form of government itself (socialist-authoritarian-theocratic-racialist) nor its policies (Israel uber alles) and least of all, for the stranglehold it has over our Dear Leadership.

If Israel sank – or swum – on its own shekels (or those provided voluntarily by willing supporters) I’d be neutral toward it – perhaps even sympathetic toward it. But of course, it depends almost entirely for its support on monies extorted by violence from me and thee and millions of other tax cattle. A goodly portion of this stolen money is used for loathsome purposes, such as brutalizing the people of Palestine (as well as the Israeli people themselves).

And please, no “anti-Semitic” howls. What goes for Israel goes for them all. Just as I reject the idea that Smith has a right to even 1 cent of my property, so also I reject the idea that a collection of Smiths subsumed under the rubric of a nation-state have any right to even 1 cent of my income.

I used to think there was a well-oiled conspiracy machine that ran the nation (and the Western world). Not, not a conspiracy of lizard folk wearing rubber masks and talking pyramids, but a real-world conspiracy like we’ve seen throughout human history, created with the intent of delivering more power and wealth into the hands of an elite minority so that they could tighten the screws on us more effectively.

Then I realized that the people who really hold the levers of power are basically morons who get to the top positions in society because they can kiss more ass and cover for each other’s mistakes more effectively than anyone else. As a result, they don’t develop anything resembling critical or logical thinking and can only flail blindly at real problems (like how not to turn the Middle East into a glowing crater). I mean, take Bush 2 and Obongo — the former was born into wealth, had all doors opened for him, and was so blithely stupid that he reacted to bin Laden’s provocation precisely the way bin Laden wanted him to. Obongo was a college professor who got doors opened for him because of his race and politics and has spent five years flailing around trying to figure out how many states we really have in the nation.

Of course, there’s the usual sharks who line their pockets through wars, defense contracts, and medicaid frauds, but let’s face it — they are perfectly happy to sit back and attach themselves to the system lick ticks on a dog. Ditto for Congress. Everyone wants to know why Congress is so stupid and spineless and we have no “good” candidates for President? Because they realize that getting that job would put their gravy train to a quick end.

So, at the end of the day, we have incompetent, horrible, shitty government that is populated by the greedy and stupid. Maybe it’s better than a full-blown Nazi-style conspiracy to seize power, but it’s like having a President Joe Hazelwood.

Conspiracy? Banking and energy run this world. They create the thousands of NGO and administrative legalities that run your life as a cost of doing business and profit centers. You think the grinning ego perverts they present to us to vote for have anything to say about it? If they tried they would be out in hours.

This post is a bit over the top. War with Syria is a bad thing, and it is a catalyst for worse things, but the simple truth is as follows:

1. It’s not going to lead to $10 gas overnight because of demand destruction. In fact, after an initial spike, gas will fall again because the world simply is not using enough of it to justify ongoing high prices unless you bring significant amounts off line. This won’t happen mostly because the despots overseas need the cash. If this was an effective way of destroying the US, they would have stopped selling oil to us years ago.

2. As attractive a target as Dear Leader is, this has been US policy all the way back to the Shah of Iran. It’s a bit hypocritical to blame Obama for all of it, even though he is the latest stooge in a long line of stooges.

3. Finally, to Clover and idiots like him, this has nothing to do with terrorism. It has nothing to do with the US, either. It has everything to do with Israel, obviously. Connect the dots and you will have your answer.

Others have suggested that this may be the cover for a collapse of the banking system and the latest financial bubble (based on QE).

Who knows?

I do know, though, that the maniacs in charge seem absolutely determined to launch yet another war in the Middle East – this time, on a country that directly borders Israel and which (unlike Iraq) has the ability to lash out against Israel in a very real way before it goes down.

And the Israeli leadership is even more demented than the US leadership.

PS: My loathing for The Chimp – the predecessor of the current Dear Leader – is epic. And no secret. You’re new here, so I’ll leave it at that!

“the maniacs in charge seem absolutely determined to launch yet another war in the Middle East”

That is a valid distinction. The maniacs in charge are obviously not elected officials of the US government. This latest push for war seems to have caught the “elected” frontmen at a time when they feel somewhat vulnerable to public opinion, for whatever reason they may feel that way.

It shows anyone who cares to look that the push for war is being made by maniacs who have yet to be identified. That same group of maniacs had a lot more cover in ’03, when the other wing of the war party was their front. Today, having burned down most of their cover which existed in the form of a functioning economy and the phalanx of media that had protected their lies from public scrutiny, they can be seen more easily.

We now see their silhouettes on the threadbare backdrop behind the scabby politicians. The silhouettes can be seen, and their desperation is about to cause them to tear the backdrop and reveal themselves. If that happens, their rule will be at an end. Even the most deluded of our fellow murkins would have to come at least partly awake to stare at what has been revealed.

“Intervening” in Syria is about as popular with the general public as Jerry Sandusky. If they pursue their latest adventure despite the overwhelming public opposition that cuts across party lines (even Republicans seem to have had enough) it will be obvious who’s really in charge…

The reason for the War in Syria is the natural gas pipeline competition between the Russian sponsored pipeline of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Russia and the USA sponsored pipeline of Quatar and its allies which would have an LNG terminal at a port in Syria. The natural gas is headed for Europe which for years has been at the mercy of the Russian natural gas monopoly. The USA sponsored pipeline would bring competition to the Russian monopoly whereas the Russian sponsored pipeline would continue to allow Russia to control/influence natural gas into Europe and thus the price of natural gas.

Having said that the fighting in Syria will create a war premium on the price of oil and hence the price of gasoline particularly over the Labor Day weekend America’s last big summer holiday weekend.

I just opened a new bottle of Osteo-BiFlex (a supplement I take – probably worthless). It was just barely over half-full. The rest was air. They don’t even stuff the open space with cotton anymore. Of course, the price has gone up, too.

The snack food industry are old veterans at that kind of packaging and probably wrote the manual that all others follow. The next back of potato chips I buy that is completely full and not half to two-thirds air will be the first (and no doubt last) – and probably a “quality control” fluke.

Oh yeah – the wife and I talk constantly about this. We buy almost nothing at the supermarkets anymore beyond house supplies. The “food” there is suspect. Luckily, we’re able to buy most of what we eat locally, from people we either know personally or know of. For example, I buy all our beef from a local farm. We raise our own chickens and swap eggs for vegetables with one of our neighbors who gardens.

An interesting and unexpected side effect of our new eating ways is that we find the taste of store-bought stuff unpleasant. A few months back, for example, I was downtown (Roanoke, not our downtown in Floyd) and got to thinking about hamburgers. I remembered I had no more ground beef in the freezer, and decided to just buy a couple pounds of ground chuck at the local (and frou frou) food store. The hamburgers didn’t taste right to me – and I’ve not bought beef at the supermarket ever again.

We are of like minds on that. But I confess that when I stayed at the Hyatt-Place motel in Roanoke, on a M/C ride from CA to DC, I ate at the Red Palace Chinese buffet nearby. It was by far the best and biggest selection of food I have ever seen in such a place. Y’all know hot to eat down there.

Astronomical prices for goods we are accustomed to paying current prices for is not the least bit fantastical.

It’s not so much that the price of the good skyrockets to mind-boggling levels in an unrealistically short period of time.

Rather it’s that the value of the fiat currency used to purchase the goods is debased radically in a short period of time. Unfortunately that is not unrealistic at all. Unfortunately that is something “The Government” can easily do, has been doing, and continues to do with a vengeance.

That is why knowledgeable Austrian oriented financial gurus such as Marc Faber, Jim Rogers, Peter Schiff, predict gold at four, five, six thousand dollars an ounce sooner rather than later.

They’re not so much predicting that “Gold will go up” astronomically. It’s more that they’re predicting “The dollar will go down” catastrophically.

Last time I looked gold was going down and for some time now. I guess if gold sellers keep predicting gold will go up in price then they’ll be right every now and then. Then again why ask gold sellers if they think gold is a good investment?

Bobbye, Don’t think for a moment that the government cannot seize unsecured assets (i.e., your bank account). You stand a better chance to keeping your wealth by having gold or silver stuffed under your mattress. What happened in Cyprus is a prelude to things to come.

Gold will be last man standing when the system has its flat tire moment. It is for savings, not investing or day trading. Since this economic crisis started in 08 (or 2000 if you choose) it is still way up.

Fuel prices go up in every country when a skirmish happens, but they never seem to go back down. The first Gulf War cost Oz 20c a litre more which never fell back even when it was over. Ditto with the hunt for Saddam. Grabbermint loves this as their fuel tax is a percentage.

In the case of O-Bomb-Ya, he should have been impeached and jailed years ago.

100% concur. America and the greater Western post-colonial Anglosphere continues to cohere if we continue to believe in a better future.

I believe in fracking, 3D printing, open source Local Motors/Github open-sourced tele-engineering of Rally Fighters and Hyperloops, deep ocean resource extraction, space tourists next year, asteroid mining two years from now, space colonization staging missions in three years, a Muslim-Christian alliance controlling a defiant 3 billion strong Papal-Caliphate army, and countless other emerging turds in the PTB’s Punch-bowl.

$10 gas is possible but I don’t think it’s likely. Remember that nearly everyone was making the same prediction prior to Baby Bush’s invasion of Iraq but the opposite happened: crude oil fell dramatically after the invasion. On March 12, 2003 the OK WTI spot price of oil closed at $37.87. On March 21, the day after the invasion officially started, the price was $27.18. Ouch. Only the shorts prospered and there weren’t many of them. Everyone else who predicted a huge spike in price lost their ass on that trade. The reason they were wrong is because they did not understand that the market had already factored in the anxiety over crude prices. Oil had been going up and up for weeks prior to the invasion and once the attack started it was like releasing a pressure value and the price relaxed. Syria is a different situation of course and there’s always uncertainty about market trajectory, but, as they say, only bet what you can afford to lose!

In the end, though, we can be certain that insanity will prosper when nothing else does.

The difference here is Iran has already stated their intent to intervene on the side of Syria. This could be done without firing a shot, simply stopping the traffic at the straight of hormuz where 50% of the worlds sweet light crude has to pass through. Iran practically straddles the straight.

They may not be wanting war – doesn’t mean they’ll do what must be done.
Balls and Brains are totally different organs, and when the brains are damaged (as per mass-media tell-a-vision brainwashing and public school indoctrination) – well, balls can’t double as brains….

I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if key members of congress haven’t been “visited” by men in black suits over the past few days reminding them that it would be “in their best interests” to back the figurehead in the Oval Office in his drive for war.

Now if only one of these spineless figureheads would suddenly grow some balls and go public about having received such a visit…

And it would likely cost a few lives, which is where most people draw the line – so, money talks, bullshit walks, and Little Johnny grows up to be a cereal killer (pun intended) when he – AND the country – would’ve been ebtter off if Senator X’s child (Little Johnny) had been planted and used as fertilizer anyway.

It takes a special kind of balls for that sort of guts. That’s assuming they won’t just Kennedy the troublemakers…
(Seriously, how many of them were killed again? In how short a time period? Not enough, yes, but still…)

OTOH – anyone else a fan of the Resident Evil films? That whole event was filmed – by a reporter – and the film sent to reputable press. Within a day, it had been “confirmed” as a hoax.

You wanna bet there isn’t something similar happening here? Even IF the Senator’s minions filmed the whole thing, and the room were bugged (and the bug undetected), it would be destroyed in a matter of hours – and then “people” (well, the bipedal animals) would forget in the next “news” cycle.
And the Senator’s son/daughter goes missing, and it’s later confirmed he/she had serious mental/drug problems (might even play at the same time for the diffusing effect – not sure that’s a word, but meaning should be clear). They find the body somewhere, message sent: Don’t get in our way.

Appropriate method for dealing with them? A PMC or “friendly fire” accident, pre-emptive. But who would “Dresden” the Tri-Lateral commission? It makes them rich, if they just turn a blind eye now and then, or promote specially-crafted legislation…. And Little Johnny / Janie never gets smeared/killed/worse, either, though they grow up to be psychotic sociopathic whores… Just following in Daddy’s footsteps.

*: I pulled names out of the air. Dropping an FAE on the UN building, or even a nuke on NYC or DC, would be pointless. The real problems are more removed than that. In Chess player terms? That would be taking a pawn with your queen. (And, would involve sacrificing said “queen” – the one with the cojones and intellect to DO something – as he/she would be hunted down as a “terrorist”.)
Who pulls the Tri-laterals’ or Bildenbergs’ or UN’s strings? THAT is the head of the beast… but I doubt they even are known to their puppets.

Still, destroy enough puppets, and the puppet-master has to get his hands dirty. Just – it’s a one-way ride, and no one will support it, and it involves a LOT of ugly collaterol damage. I’m not game for that – and …
Well, let’s leave it at that. Let’s just say, you learn stuff when you spend half (or more) of your life trying to forget who and what you are – and are forced to remember every morning.

Either that, or they’ve been outright bought off. I’ve pointed out this possibility to several people, however most of them respond with derision. The false flags are so obvious now, anyone who denies these things routinely go on are either naive, delusional, intellectually dishonest or just plain dumb. It really is sad.

Indeed. And in this case, it’s entirely possible the Russians will decide to “intervene” on behalf of their proxy. Even if not, Iran has indicated it will support Syria – and Syria’s Dear Leader has stated his military will strike Israel if attacked. If that happens, it could be a Sarajevo Moment.

The little bit I’ve heard about targets have all been “infrastructure.” This is being defined as “runways” but as we all know from previous battles, the 1st thing to go is the electricity. A power grid is an easy soft target, unlikely to be defended against air attack. Since all the other stuff runs on electricity you’ve effectively knocked out your enemy’s ability to defend itself.

This will be a disaster for the Syrian people, as it was in Iraq. And it will be a boon to GE, who will get to rebuild the whole thing after the Syrians “vote in” a new prime minister who knows how to play ball.

Your reasoning is right, but you are looking at the wrong thing. Power grids are not essential, but (these days) liquid fuel is. Taking out oil depots etc. would greatly harm mobility and back up generators for radar etc., but taking out power stations or a grid would be much less serious.

Those anti-ship missiles, the same sort that Iran has, would very likely send many ships bubbling down into the briny deep. When has the US ever faced such weapons in a live exercise and survived? Huh? Answer: NEVER. All of the anti-missile defense systems I’ve ever witnessed in action were on drones and never in the heat of battle. And that in itself would be the kind of slap to the face that Uncle Sam so desperately needs. He constantly sticks his red white and blue dick into places it has no business being.

Actually, Argentina was more than a developing country even then. Its soldiers were actually better equipped than British ones, just worse trained (they mistakenly thought that the British couldn’t cross the terrain without mechanised transport, and that they couldn’t press home an attack when ammunition ran low – forgetting about marching and bayonets).

Declaration of interest: my grandfather lived and worked there for several years.

I will lay odds of an invasion hours before the US banking collapse to cover their tracks. Any takers?

Maybe Obama got slapped and told to put it back in his pants, because he sure is doing some fancy verbal back peddling now.

Couldn’t be Putin telling him нет, or the nearly politically DOA British Prime Minister, or Rand Paul, or guys like this shooting their mouth off:
” In an interview with The Hill, former congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) said that should President Obama green-light an air strike in Syria, the U.S. military would “become Al Qaeda’s air force.” could it?

Who – regardless of party affiliation – wants this country involved in another war? Almost no one.

Alas, Eric, I wish that were true. I’m already hearing the usual suspects (the brain-dead, ignorant, functionally illiterate, jingoist, evangelitard, pseudo-patriots) starting back up with their “U-S-A! U-S-A!” brainstemming.

My own mother, ever the reliable neocon dupe, emailed me yesterday wondering “who’s pulling Obama’s strings with this push to war against Syria?” Finally fed up, I emailed her back to remind her if it was her hero, the Chimptard, still in office and doing what the Obamunist is now doing, she’d be preaching war from every pulpit she could get access to. If she and her Republican idols object to this latest round of interventionist nonsense, it’s only because it’s not one of their own dropping the bombs.

No response. I guess I struck a raw nerve.

As I’ve said here before, the only thing that will EVER cure Amoricons of their war addiction will be if they get a taste of Dresden, Hiroshima, My Lai, or Fallujah in New York, Dallas, Minneapolis, or San Francisco. They just cannot and do not learn unless they get burned.

That’s the real answer right there Eric. Send McCain, Lindsey Graham, Cheney, the Chimp, Obama, etc. over there as the first wave instead of letting them hide here in their undisclosed locations surrounded by lots of guys in costumes with guns.
That would end all the wars in a hurry.

Yep, and I’ve pointed that out before too. I can actually sympathize with someone of my mother’s generation (the so-called “Silent Generation” that came between the “Greatest” [sic] and the Boomers), a generation that came of age right after the last war that the U.S. supposedly won (a debatable proposition, dependent on what one considers “winning,” but I’ll save that for another rant elsewhere), a time when America was on top of the world, had an unstoppable economy, and could do no wrong in the eyes of most of the non-totalitarian world. That type of “normal”, for the average Joe and Jane Sixpack in America, formed a very powerful grip on the psyche, especially in the formative years, making it difficult to understand other perspectives (a German survivor of World War II from, say, Berlin who is of that same generation and who emigrated to America after the war would, I argue, be much less sanguine and optimistic about the future right now, having survived the very worst war has to offer and thus seeing through the bullshit painted by the Establishment stage managers).

Simply stated, it’s almost impossible for an 80-year-old raised on comfortable lies to admit that they’ve been duped. It just ain’t gonna happen. Mom will probably go to her grave, the country she loved in tatters, controlled by a violent police state, the retirement savings she and Dad saved for over half a century together reduced to worthless monopoly money, depending on her children for charity (who will probably have none to give), still chanting “U.S.A! U.S.A!” The alternative –admitting the truth– would be even more soul-destroying and humiliating.

Well, NATO… aka Uncle Sams European expeditionary force, flew air cover for the KLA during the Kosovo debacle. How else could the Islamists on the ground have ever won when they were clearly getting the shit kicked out of them? Sound familiar to today?

I know. How about driving more 1960s and 70s vehicles that get 10 mpg. By the way I average 40 mpg if I take it easy.

Maybe we need Eric in charge. He has all the answers. The problem is even the experts that spend all of their time on such subjects are not sure on this one. I just like to know how Eric knows so much more than they do by looking at the news last night? Let them continue using gas and chemical weapons and then you would have how many millions killed in NY city? Those guys over there would do it in a second if they had a chance.

Clover, you are such an incredible stooge for the state. You’d be proud to lick the boot that kicks you, as long as it belonged to an “official”, wouldn’t you? The simple fact is the Anglo-American empire along with it’s private international bankster owners is toppling regimes with their own central banks. If you are a small country with valuable natural resources and your leadership doesn’t always want to play ball with the purveyors of the petro-dollar, you are done.

Gaddafi in Libya wanted gold for oil and threatened to reestablish the Dinar (i.e. a real gold coin standard) as their national currency. That would have been a sharp stick in the international banksters’ eye. Can’t have third world players bettering themselves now can we? So somehow a rag-tag band of blue jean clad rebels put together their own national bank in a matter of days, before going on to sodomize the Colonel with a rifle barrel? No mean feat. I’d say they had help. Qui bono?

How about Iraq? What weapons of mass destruction? Oh, that’s right, Saddam wanted payment for oil in gold didn’t he? No more petro-fiat-paper. Now when you’re printing “money” (which it ain’t) out of thin air, you can’t have any recalcitrant players bucking the system. It might catch on, people would see the international banking cartel for what it is and a least some of the banksters could end up broke and clothed in tar and feathers. That would be a weapon of mass destruction, for them.

Wake up clover. It’s simple greed and power lust that drives most politicians and the folks that control the “money” know that. Fascism is real, it’s right here, right now and you don’t want to believe it. This Fourth Reich is the symbiosis of huge banks, corporations and gun-vernment bleeding the rest of us in an environment of strictly controlled competition and regulation and it’s gone live worldwide. There are only a few players left that don’t buy in. Stick a fork in them and you’ll see that they’ll be done soon as well. I realize you love this system and probably “work” for the gun-vernment too. But make no mistake about, they’ll throw you under the bus if it’s in your superiors’ best interests (or their owners’). Live by the sword clover and you’ll die by the sword, even if someone else wields it for you.

Libya had just completed the worlds largest ever fresh water pipeline, thereby providing a high degree of independence to north African countries who had been indebted to US public and private businesses for decades and under contractual obligations for desalinization services; (see “Confessions of an Economic Hitman”.

In Libya it was all about Gaddafi’s plan to introduce the gold dinar, a single African currency made from gold. That would have devastated the petrodollar and our dear “leaders” wouldn’t have none of that. One of the first things done after Gaddafi was killed, and new rulers were installed, was to set up a “central” bank in Libya.

Yes P.M., you are correct on the Euro. It just seems to me at the time that Hussein made noises about other commodities including gole as well as “oil-for-food.” Perhaps my memory fails me. But the bottom line was he wanted to trade in anything other than the “perto-dollar” which he considered to be “the enemy’s” currency. Accomplishing that would indeed have been deploying a weapon of mass destruction from the Federal Reserve banksters’ perpective.

Libya had Ghaddafi to thank for the Jamahiriya (direct democracy), oil proceeds returned directly to the people, free education through college, free healthcare, an excellent record of women’s rights and human rights, fewer people living below the poverty level than the netherlands and the highest GDP in North Africa. The Great Man-Made River Authority tapped a massive aquifer that turned Libya green. If 2007 flow rates were maintained it would be sustainable for an estimated 1000 years! But the lethal issue was gold (or anything other than the USSA dollar) for oil.You don’t buck the Anglo-American Empire (or especially the bansters that own it) and live tell about it.

Now the USSA Express is steaming full power toward Syria. And you can rest assured that Persia is on their list of scheduled stops unless they knuckle under and let the banksters call the shots there too.

There you go Eric with libertarian nonthinking ways! Tell you what Eric, if would have one of those terrorists in your house with a gun to your wife do you think speeding nicely to him will do anything? If they have chemical weapons in NY City do you think talking nicely to them would do anything? How about Hitler. Do you think talking nicely to him would have done anything?

Eric it is kind of like you and the police. Do you think you and others will drive safer without any laws and police enforcement? Not in my lifetime.

The only “terrorists” I’m worried about are those in DC – in government. These terrorists have gassed Americans (Waco, Texas), including women and children. These terrorists routinely brutalize innocent people here. They are a constant and very real threat, always hanging over our heads.

Yet you’re shitting your pants over an internecine power struggle in a country literally on the other side of the planet that poses as much of a threat to you or me as an ET invasion.

Amazing.

Worse, you support lobbing bombs – that is, having people killed and maimed – whom you’ve never even met, nor ever will, nor who ever even heard of you, much less attempted to harm you. All because your Dear Leaders tell you they are “enemies.”

And that’s despicable.

I’d like you to put on your empathy shoes, if you have ‘em.

Imagine: The Dear Leader of a foreign state announces his country will “intervene” in this country – that is, lob bombs at us – on account of some perfidy committed by our Dear Leader (for example, torturing prisoners). How would you feel about that, Clover? Would you cheer the foreign Dear Leader who hurled bombs at your neighborhood? That perhaps killed someone dear to you?

No?

No try – for once – to imagine why the US (the US regime) is loathed the world over.

Oh, sure, that makes perfect sense clover…….Syrians killing Syrians, so we think it’s our right to intervene by…….killing more Syrians.

Russia just sent Syria their most advanced anti-ship missiles. What are you going to say when these are fired at our Navy, a few of our ships get sunk and a bunch of our sailors die? What then, clover? Full-scale invasion? Boots on the ground?

You think Iran is going to sit still for the US attacking one of their biggest allies? How about Russia? Putin is no empty suit.

You and the rest of your cloverish maniacs are going to start WW3 and it will be the perfect excuse for the domestic clampdown that’s all but ready to go here.

What a joke Cloverism = Disease! You say that Russia is sending Syria missiles and you think a country like that which is getting fully armed has the right to use gas that is capable of killing millions. You are why I say that libertarians are stupid.

Well, Clover, how about the fact that this same unctuous, moralizing government also supplied chemical weapons precursors to Saddam – and knew (and did nothing about) Saddam’s use of said weapons to murder thousands of Iranians? I guess that’s ok.

Or, how about the gassing of women and children by this government at Waco, Texas?

That’s ok, too.

Right?

Maybe Russia – or China – ought to draw a “red line” against this government?

Obama is guilty of war crimes under the Nuremburg standard, including (as he is about to do) attacking a sovereign state that has neither attacked us nor threatened to in any plausible manner. He has asserted the right to have people executed without formal charges having been presented/proved in a court of law; he has people caged and held indefinitely without their ever having been even charged with any specific crime, much less convicted.

How would you like to have US cities bombed by Russia or China – in the name of “intervention” against an “outlaw regime” that has “thumbed its nose at the international community? Surely, a few thousand dead American civilians would be a small price to pay…

Hey Clover, you should click on the donate link at the top so you receive the Clovers Quarterly like us members. I got two words for that spread of Rachel Maddow in the last issue. Hubba hubba.
Make it worth their while, and Dom might even give you unlimited posting access.
I can feel the thrill of righteous rulership running up my leg just thinking about it.

Nice Eric. You say that nothing happened bad at Waco, Texas? They were little angels that we should have left alone? The guy in charge was having sex with kids. You are fine with that? You also are fine with a guy slugging a policeman for no reason. Eric we do not need kind in our country.

You’re either ignorant of the facts about Waco – or (per usual) simply choose to ignore them.

Koresh was charged with spurious weapons violations (it’s not illegal to have more than “x” number of rifles, etc.). He offered to come into town to meet with the cops. They wanted a publicity stunt. The media was invited. It was a set-up, designed to show the “heroic” BATF in action, so as to justify its existence.

In any case, burning women and children to death is what happened. And it didn’t need to happen, Clover. Those people were surrounded and not going anywhere. They presented no conceivable threat to anyone outside their compound. Oh, but the kids were being abused! (This allegation was never proved and is quite probably a smear. Koresh may have been a religious nut, but the people with him were there willingly and none seemed to have been done violence.)

So, let’s burn them to death.

That’s the logic of a psychopath.

I note, further, that you declined to respond to the fact I mentioned earlier in re the role of the United State government aiding and abetting Saddam Hussein’s gassing of thousands of innocent Iraqis, including women and children.

One of the (many) things about Clover and his fellows that wearies me is that their psychosis – their bloodlust – will result in blowback. On us as much as on them.

Most of us – the regulars here – are appalled by the idea of lobbing bombs at Syria. Because it means the deaths and maiming of potentially thousands of innocent people, or at least, people who’ve done nothing to any of us, nor threatened to. And who will be filled with a righteous rage against all of us as a consequence. The “evildoers” and “terrorists” are to a great extent people who’ve been turned into berserkers because of the actions of this government. Actions for which they hold all Americans responsible.

It’s millions of bastards like Clover who have aroused the hatred of the world for the United State. And we’ll be dragged down along with them.

That’s it, exactly, BrentP. Clovers are psychos. Problem is, most Americans have become Clovers. They don’t want to face the reality of what they propose, of what they support, they don’t want to think beyond point A.

It’s no wonder they quickly dismiss the subject of their own gooberment burning children alive. … It’s like they enjoy it. ?

I imagine Bevin’s example of crowds of people looking intently at their I-Pad-whatever’s and never looking up at the sky to see the death and misery raining down upon them. It’s exactly, EXACTLY! like a bully terrorizing them. They just ignore it and hope it goes away while pretending it doesn’t exist. The very best of them don’t even have to pretend. It’s Absolute ignorance on display.

Chemtrail Poisons are Ruining Your Health from Above, and You may Not Know

Did you watch the video in that link? I know an 87 yr. old woman who recently got shingles, it fits the pattern. Clovers of the world dismiss any questions and defer to ‘authority’ while their money goes towards beheading the Christians in villages who do not submit.
Does that sound familiar?
…It’s a sick world we live it. Thank goodness for the Freedomistas.

I vacillate on this, but I also think that – mostly – Clovers are also just dumb.

I’ll give you an example:

Last night, while talking w/Dom about a site issue, we got to talking about his famous DWI checkpoint video – which has been the object of thousands of responses on YouTube. Many are from Clovers, who recite the idiot mantra we all know so well: They’re getting dangerous drunks off the roads! What if one of your loved ones was killed by a drunk driver! And so on.

It does not occur to these blockheads that – according to the same reasoning – we should also embrace random searches of our homes, perhaps even of our body cavities. After all: They’d be getting dangerous (insert here)… And so on.

Now, either they are just dumb – or their conceptual faculty is nonexistent or crippled.

In the end, I suppose, it really doesn’t matter. Because you can’t fix stupid – and the rest may be too broken to repair.

I forgot to add, I often wonder how Geo-engineering is not Jean’s definition of first aggression. Then I imagine how it’s the same as a bully shoving you, trying to get you to take the first swing.

When I played football, the dirty secret was, the lineman would hit the opposing player with their fists in an illegal manner in a way that no ref could see. One of the goals of that was to get the opposing player to commit a foul.

Is that – kind of -what’s happening now?
It’s like we have to take it laying down?
Unto death?
And through the misery?

ANyway, you guys and your comments really do make it hard to be Read Only. … I’ll have to double down.

Eric, I think it has something to do with that “American Exceptionalism” thing. Which means we can and should bully the world because we have a bigger dick. Problem is “except” our infrastructure, culture, morals and economy are no longer. We have been sold out by our clover sympathizers in the name of (credit to Ayn Rand) Altruism.

There is also an element of savage callousness involved. By which I mean the glib, casual way the typical American endorses the killing (by others) of other people, provided they are The Other and so characterized by the organs of the state.

I remember being a small kid and reading a short story about WW I. It was written by an ordinary soldier, who had awakened to the insanity of attempting to kill another man – a man probably not unlike himself – who had done him no wrong but who (like himself) had been conditioned to regard The Other as The Enemy – and to be slain.

We’re not permitted to ask why steel buildings can disintegrate outward and downward, like a pyroclastic volcanic flow, at free-fall speed, because of office fires. If we do, we’re labeled, “conspiracy theorists.”

But people who use this label aren’t interested in reality; they don’t want to forward investigation, discussion or understanding. Their goal is to suppress all of that. And so, we have to be more than conspiracy “theorists.” We must be conspiracy realists. Because conspiracy is real, it is how the world very often works. We know it from history; we know it from the hidden histories available to anyone who wants to look. Or, to quote Carroll Quigley, “Conspiracy is the normal continuation of normal politics by normal means.”

The most fascinating part about what he was saying is that Americans must now support Al-Qaida (Al-CIAda) to kill people in Syria!

Why? Because it’s a war on terrorism! That war, by the way, was supposed to be against people like Al-Qaida who, according to the official conspiracy theory (see video below for the story in just five minutes), started the war on terrorism on September 11th, 2001.

Now on the eve of 9/11, 2013, Barack Hussein Obama makes the case for fighting alongside Al-Qaida in Syria. You could never have told me that last sentence ten years ago without me snorting my drink out of my nose. In fact, I have a hard time repressing my chortle at this moment.

How absolutely dumb-downed is the average US populace to even be able to swallow this stuff?

Dear Bevin. I get it. Who needs books when we have the media and school-teacher-led-flat-screen-propaganda-programmed-devices to tell us what happened over on Revisionism Street.

Re:9/11 – Who needs weapons of mass destruction and poison gas when you could steal an aluminum 737 and destroy an amazing array of thick-steel-reinforced-asbestos-covered buildings and nearby building 7’s in one shot. Brain checked at the door.

eric, do you think the police went to burn women and children up? Do you honestly think they were torched on purpose to kill them? Tell me eric if someone comes to arrest you and resist arrest do you blame the police?

If they were following the laws and not enslaving kids for sex among other things do you think any of that would have happened?

The police never have bothered me or my family or anyone I know. Tell me why that is eric? It is because I and the ones I know are not enslaving kids and having sex with them.

Yes, Clover, that is exactly what I think. Because I know for a fact that they brought military equipment to the scene for just that purpose.

And, moreover, cops are just as responsible for their actions as you or I – or, do you believe there is a different (more lenient) standard for the goons you venerate?

These goons chose to fire flammable canisters at a compound full of women and kids. Do you suppose they did not realize a fire might result?

Meanwhile, the whole place was surrounded. Koresh wasn’t going anywhere. Hence, there was no need to fire flammable canisters at the compound – unless of course you define need as the need to make sure an example is set that you’d better not try to hole up in your house and embarrass the BATF by not frog-marching out the door when ordered.

So, what happened was those women and kids were burned to death for the sake of saving face for the BATF. There was no “public safety” threat. And if the women and kid inside were “in danger,” it hardly helped them to burn them to death. Why not wait it out? Why not seal the perimeter and use negotiators to get the women and kids out of there? What skin would it have been off their (the BATF/FBI’s) noses, eh? Weren’t they there to help the women and kids?

You’re a vile person, Clover. Utterly without humanity. A real piece of shit.

Eric you are a nice story teller! Are things not bad enough so that libertarians have to make up their own stories? From what I have heard of the facts and the actual proof with cameras among other things is that your so called gas canisters that were somewhat flammable the authorities launched at the a bunker well away from the main buildings hours before the buildings went up in flames. From every report there is that is factual shows that the people inside the buildings caused the fires! It was their choice to stay there.
You said the police should have allowed the kids and women to leave? Do you forget the police were outside the compound for days and weeks? They could have left any time if Koresh let them. He was too busy abusing the children! Tell me Eric why you back sex offenders and drunks on the roadway? Your sex offenders and drunks have killed hundreds of times more people than our police have and usually the police have people shooting at them like at Waco. Maybe you need to leave our country if you are so afraid of our police. I figure I have a 1 in a billion chance of being killed by our police. I have a one in a million chance of being killed by Brent on our roadways. I have a one in a thousand or so chance of being killed by a drunk driver. You love drunk drivers! I am not worried like guys like you that feel it is your right to beat up on police.

Bevin thank you very much! You say that the police blasted loud music into the compound. Very good of you to bring that up! The reason they did that is so that they did not have to forcibly enter the compound and allow the people to give up. They had illegal machine guns and were sex offenders. Eric said that they just ran in with guns blazing but thanks to you I am backed up with what I was saying.

If you resist arrest with automatic machine guns blazing I guess you get whatever you are asking for which can be as bad as you expected it to be.

The ATF went in first. They did go in there guns blazing. They shot first, just like Eric said.

When the Davidians shot back, the ATF was forced to retreat in disgrace and became a political embarrassment. That’s when the FBI took over from them.

For a while it looked as if the FBI was going to be more reasonable. But as anybody who remembers Ruby Ridge knows, it only looked that way.

Their FLEA mentality, their reptilian brains soon took over. They used the psyops I referred to as a prelude to doing what the ATF did before them — go in guns blazing.

You know something? Some apologists for the gubmint could be forgiven for thinking you are a shill for libertarian gubmint critics. Your “arguments” are so feeble, it looks like you’re taking a dive, like you’re setting yourself up to take a beating, so we can look good!

Bevin there are witnesses who say the police did not fire first. Whatever, if there was thousands of witnesses and video proof you would never believe that anyway.

One thing you have to keep in mind, there were illegal machine guns in the compound and also hand grenades. Without illegal weapons this would never have happened. It still goes back to your libertarian views that people can break whatever laws they feel like or endanger others whenever they feel like it and the polcie in your view are always wrong.
One more thing, the police are not invading my home. Why is that you say? I do not flaunt illegal and outlawed weapons. The neighbors had complained of machine gun fire in the compound and with the weapons purchased by the group that are easily converted to illegal weapons the police had just cause in a search and arrest. One can only hope that such people if they are breaking laws with outlawed weapons that they use them on libertarians like you that bow down and thank such law breakers.

Bevin there is one more thing. The fires broke out hours after the gas canisters were fired into the compound well away from the main buildings. Tell us how you could blame the government for something the government either did not cause or they had hours to escape. There was proof that the people inside the compound started the fires. Facts do not matter to people like you though.

Clover – I am not one given to beating dead horses, but lets start with the facts, OK?

“According to the UPS driver, his suspicions were heightened when boxes broke open by *6 accident, and he could tell their contents were inert hand grenade hulls and a quantity of blackpowder. [24] The Waco Sheriff’s Office was informed of the “suspicious” deliveries, and the sheriff’s office in turn notified the BATF. [25]

Koresh had a number of raising funds schemes for the Branch Davidians: mounting inert grenade hulls as plaques and selling them at gun shows was one of their biggest money-makers. [26] Custom-sewn magazine vests in tall and big sizes, under the “David Koresh Brand” label, were another speciality. [27] Koresh also used gun shows as a way to make a profit on selling surplus meals-ready-to-eat (MREs). In addition, the Davidians assembled gun parts into complete guns, which they sold to the public through a licensed dealer. The Davidians also bought many semi-automatic rifles as an investment, assuming that an anti-gun President would act in such a way as to increase their value dramatically; just as President George Bush’s ban on the import of such rifles had increased their value in 1989. [28] On the day of the BATF attack, many of the Davidian guns were on display miles away at a gun show.

While most guns owned by the Davidians were for investment purposes, the Davidians did own guns for protection. Koresh was concerned about a possible attack from George Roden, the former Branch Davidian leader, with whom Koresh and his followers had a shoot-out in 1987. [29] Roden, who escaped from an institution for the criminally insane and was later recaptured, had reportedly threatened, “I’m not going to come back with BB guns.” [30] They also feared attacks from other persons who regularly sent hate mail to Koresh.

*7 C. The National Firearms Act
Ownership of machine guns in the United States is legal, but the owner must pay a federal tax and file a registration form with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. [31] The BATF’s legal reason for the Branch Davidian investigation was to see if the Davidians were manufacturing machine guns illegally. If, on the other hand, Koresh had simply bought machine guns that were made before 1986, rather than allegedly manufacturing them, and if Koresh had paid the proper tax of $200 per gun and filed the appropriate paperwork, he would have been in full compliance with the law.

In other words, the legal cause for the BATF investigation was not machine guns per se, but ownership or manufacturing of machine guns without registration and taxation. The seventy- six person BATF Mount Carmel raid was, ultimately, a tax collection case.

The federal law requiring machine guns to be taxed and registered is the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA), which was enacted with little controversy after the National Rifle Association stated that it had no objection to the law. [32] If not for the National Firearms Act, there would probably have been no BATF investigation or raid on Mount Carmel, and needless deaths would not have occurred.

The BATF investigation of Koresh quickly led to Henry McMahon, doing business as Hewitt Handguns, Koresh’s favorite gun dealer. The lead BATF agent on the Koresh case, Davy Aguilera, listed in his affidavit for the search and arrest warrants all of the relatively recent purchases by Koresh, including flare launchers, over one hundred rifles, an M-76 grenade launcher, various kits, cardboard tubes, blackpowder, and practice grenades. [43] All of those items may be lawfully owned without the government’s permission. [44] Accordingly, the purchases, while listed in the affidavit, did not in themselves establish probable cause that Koresh or his followers had violated or were planning to violate any federal law.

The question for the magistrate was not whether the Branch Davidians were normal and righteous, or weird and sinful, but whether the warrant application presented probable cause to believe that evidence of a crime would be found at the Mount Carmel Center. Under our Constitution, an observation that people are heavily exercising their constitutional rights must not be an element in creating probable cause.

After the BATF attack on Mount Carmel, Aguilera returned tocourt *32 to ask for an expanded search warrant. In the second warrant application, Aguilera reported an incident of child sexual abuse by Koresh which had been alleged by a Texas social worker. No time frame for the alleged abuse was given. [137] Even after the massive shoot-out, Aguilera was apparently still determined to prejudice the courts by bringing up possible violations of Texas state law which, nearly a year before, the State of Texas had found no cause to pursue further. [138]

Based on the rambling fifteen-page affidavit by Aguilera which climaxed with the report of agent Rodriguez, Aguilera announced, “I believe that Vernon Howell, also known as David Koresh, and/or his followers . . . are unlawfully manufacturing and possessing machineguns and explosive devices.” [160] Magistrate Green apparently agreed, and on February 25, 1993, issued a search warrant for machine guns and destructive devices and an arrest warrant for Vernon Howell, a.k.a. David Koresh, for possession of destructive devices. [161] The key evidence appears to have been Koresh’s religious views, pro-gun rights views, criticism of federal gun laws, and hostility toward the BATF, all of which are protected by the First Amendment.

On March 19, 1993, as part of the negotiations between the government and Koresh, Koresh was allowed to see the original search warrant. Accordingly, any law enforcement purpose for keeping the warrant secret from the public vanished. Nevertheless, the warrant remained sealed until after the April 19, 1993 fire at the Branch Davidian compound. [162] Had the warrant been dissected while the siege was in progress, the fact the warrant was built on falsehoods and distortions might have become an important topic of discussion in the media, and might have created pressure for the federal government to pursue only peaceful outcomes. By the time the warrant was released, however, Mount Carmel was in ashes and the warrant was irrelevant.http://www.davekopel.com/waco/lawrev/warrant.htm

Not counting the hundreds of individuals involved in helping to resolve the standoff, who were located in other cities such as San Antonio, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., there were a minimum of 719 law enforcement personnel committed on-site at Waco on any given day during the standoff.

Although, as will be discussed later in this report, there is some question whether or not there were ever any true negotiations with actual “give and take” on each side, a significant number of individuals did exit the compound. (3) These can be summarized as follows:
Date Departed

So basically the Davidians were guilty of being weird people making a living in the gun business. It is always the people who are different that government goes after first knowing full well that people like Clover here will have no sympathy whatsoever for them. Not only that but will believe anything the government makes up.

We are slowly getting to day where Mr and Mrs mainstream america and there kids will be treated the way the different people have been treated for decades in mass. Some years ago it was just the odd human interest news story where some ‘good person’ got treated the way ‘different people’ get treated. They would complain to the news media and they would run the story. Today its become routine. Not much longer and it will be normal and not even newsworthy.

Clover here has boasted about investments it has. That will be a prime target for government investigation and an armed 3am raid on Clover’s home. Not to mention civil asset forfeiture. Just remember Clover, you supported it when they did it to other people, when it happens to you, who will object?

Garysco there is only one fact that is relevant. There was a legal search warrant for the compound. If as you say nothing they did or had was illegal and they allowed the legal search there would not have been anyone killed. There was definitely enough cause for the search warrant with all the facts presented.

The neighbors even hear automatic gunfire.

With that said the libertarians say the government is out to get them. When you have reach back 20 years ago for examples of how evil the government is then I say you are idiots.

BrentP We have no more of a police state than we had 200 years ago. If they have not got to me yet or my ancestors they never will! If they are out to get us all then tell me all the people that have posted here which they have gotten to? Yes if you act like an idiot and stockpile illegal weapons and break many serious laws they are probably going to try to get you and I hope they do. In the mean time there are thousands of gang members and other extremists groups they are going to go after before me. If you try enough Brent with your illegal and dangerous ways they hopefully will go after you. They will not go after me or my family in my lifetime.

At age 19, I was arrested and caged – and faced a decade in prison – for the non-crime of growing pot plants. I say “non-crime” because no other person was harmed by me, no other person was defrauded by me. Nonetheless, I was arrested by men with guns – who would have used those guns on me, had I attempted to defend my right to be left unmolested (since I had harmed no one) and taken away and placed in a cage.

This sort of thing happens every day to thousands – to millions – of peaceful people who’ve used no violence against anyone. Who have merely “offended” some “law.”

And you think it’s ok.

Just as you think it’s ok to immolate women and children on the basis of “serving a warrant” on a man who had committed no crime – and who had certainly harmed no one.

Just as you think it’s ok to accuse a foreign country’s leader of using “chemical weapons” and without any proof, lob bombs on innocent women and children who did nothing to you or anyone you even know.

Just as you think it’s ok for the thug-scrum in DC to have used radioactive weapons (i.e., depleted uranium) that have poisoned thousands (and killed thousands more) including defenseless women and kids who never did a got-damned thing to you, either.

Just as you know doubt think it’s ok that a thug scrum kicked in the door of Adam Kokesh’s home and put him in a cage – probably for years to come – for the non-crime of putting a shell into a shotgun . . . and pointing it at no one.

To date, after millions of dollars spent in excruciatingly detailed investigations, not one single “automatic” weapon, part, explosive device, or bomb directly traceable to the people involved has been found. EVER. That is the legacy of the Federal Government’s BATF, 70 something dead, not one gun or device to show for it, and not one person harmed by the Davidians prior to the raid. What a great loving Stazi agency we should all crap our pants over if we get a call from. Of course you love and honor them clover, they are there to protect you from all of us free and critical thinkers.

The only BATF action was to promote the proven liars to better jobs.

Re: the neighbors complaining about “automatics”. Those statements were never verified, and no usable “evidence” of anything other than shots fired at the compound were ever presented. I did not include them because of space.

Neither did I include the many weeks of video surveillance the BATF had secretly placed in the fields to spy on the complex, but no evidence of wrongdoing was ever obtained.

I also left out the lies and misinformation the BATF people told to the PRE-raid press corps to drum up support for a bigger budget in Congress. Even so liberal a source as 60 Minutes TV later called them lairs. I left that out for space reasons.

You can only fallback to one thing, clover. Who fired the first shot. Because everything else you say is just a group of conflicting, un-provable press statements and your own sock-puppet imagination.

I understand Eric. You are a drug pushing ex convict. That explains everything. The reason you have no brain any more is because of all the drugs you did as a youth.

You say the police had guns when you were arrested and they would have used them if you started beating them up or worse? Yes if you act like a stupid jerk that is endangering others you get what you ask for.

Brent said that the police will get me for doing nothing wrong. Eric comes back and said he was breaking laws and the police did their job of enforcing laws that were on the books at that time. Like I told Brent, if you act like a jerk and break laws the police are supposed to take you in. They will not take me in because I do not do such stupid things.

Fortunately, Clover, I was ultimately only convicted of a misdemeanor. And that was expunged. So, to correct your as-usual atrocious – illiterate – statement: I am not a “convict,” ex or otherwise. That term refers to people who’ve been convicted of felonies.

But, the more salient (look it up, Clover; it’s a big word, I realize) correction is your use of the term, “pusher.” I never “pushed” – that is, coerced, manipulated or otherwise wheedled anyone to partake of the plants I grew. I did offer some for sale occasionally. And sometimes, people freely bought. Just as a home brewer might. Exactly as a home brewer might.

Do you consider a person who sells beer or wine – or cars – a “pusher,” too?

How is the free, uncoerced manufacture/sale/use of any of these things a harm – as such – to anyone? Yet some are arbitrarily illegal. And for you and people like you, that’s sufficient warrant to destroy their lives – even to kill them.

You’re an utter imbecile. Worse, you’re a thug with no empathy for others. I related to you my experience as a teenager – a college kid – whose life was almost ruined because I grew some plants. Doesn’t bother you at all that I – and countless hundreds of thousands of others, who never harmed anyone – faced such a thing, over nothing. Over an arbitrary, ridiculous victimless “crime” violation. You’re ok with throwing away people’s lives over such nonsense.

I permit your posts to appear precisely because you are an imbecile – and a cretin, too.

Clover, you don’t have to do anything wrong. The davidians didn’t break any laws. Neither do countless other people every year who are wrongly raided based on lies or just a typographical error by the cops. Yet you have no empathy what so ever for these people. People like you cause me to hope that karma does indeed exist.

BrentP for not doing anything wrong there were a lot of them that got jail sentences. They had every chance in the world to leave which many of them did. They had every chance to allow the search warrant to be carried out. Yes Brent the only sympathy I have for what happened to them is that kids died who did not have the choice to leave along with many of the others. The rest of them made it their choice to fight it out.

Clover, you really need to see how the system works up close and personal to figure it out I think. It’s sad that is the only way you can learn anything. Then again maybe that won’t even do it.

Anything davidians may have been convicted of were things that occurred as a result of the raid and siege. It is not uncommon for people who are wrongly accused and attacked by government employees to end up convicted of something if they live through it.

Perhaps when a 3am raid comes to your home they’ll find something to convict you of too. When you cower under your bed they may charge you with obstruction or something. If you come out to greet them and shake one of the cops’ hands they’ll see that as assault on an officer. If you shake off a police dog, the same. Given all the laws on the books they’ll probably find something wrong to charge you with even if it amounts to an incorrectly routed sink drain. If that doesn’t work they’ll just plant something. Maybe some pot, then they’ll take your home under civil asset forfeiture.

Also, if it is the feds, your assets will be frozen so you cannot afford a lawyer. You won’t qualify for public defender because you have assets. One way or another you’ll end up in prison because some cop put the wrong number on the warrant unless you can get the media or libertarian or civil rights groups to help you.

Hope it doesn’t happen to you Clover, but if it does, remember what you’ve written.

Eric selling drugs to others at that time was definitely illegal. As far as a victimless crime goes that could be farther from the truth. If that person that you sold the pot to was under the influence and killed someone in a traffic accident or fell off a balcony or whatever you would have been directly responsible. The same as having a house party with alcohol and you supply the drinks and let the driver drive home and he kills someone in a traffic accident. I forgot, you think it is a good thing to have drunks on the road.

Alcohol is a “drug” – but now legal (though once upon a time, not). It is an entirely arbitrary thing to categorize one “drug” as “illegal” – and another legal.

Is the only relevant consideration whether a given action is “illegal”?

If so, what of laws that once decreed it “illegal” for a slave to run away from his massa? Closer to home, how about the law that decreed it “illegal” to make/sell alcohol? Do you think it was right to cage people for that, too?

Next:

Do you also believe that the guy at 711 who sold a six pack of beer to some guy who went home, drank it all in 10 minutes and then went out and drove drunk and hit/killed someone is criminally or otherwise responsible for that man’s actions?

Notice the boatload of jumps clover makes. The huge leaps he/she/it takes while ignoring previous statements and dismissing any smidgen of personal responsibility on the part of anyone.
For clovers, It’s always the fault of some inanimate thing or substance, it’s never Just an accident, or due to simple stupidity, and certainly never due to poor road design.

American clovers see individuals as though they were androids, incapable of free will and the like. American clovers see individuals as nothing more than software, digital bits.

American clovers have given up their humanity, and see no humanity around them.

Now Clover defends collateral damage. Or what it should really be called, collateral murder.

Perhaps Clover you’ll get experience a wrong address police raid of your home at 2am.

They wouldn’t have set out to kill you or someone you care about or your pet, it will just be the way it turned out because someone with an address similar to you or vaguely matching your physical description committed a crime. If those other people weren’t doing bad things then you wouldn’t be dead.

It’s still not working. You’re still coming across like a shill for us libertarians. Your “rebuttals” are so feeble, they still seem like you’re taking a dive to make us look good.

The bullet holes in the doors to the church buildings revealed that the shots were fired by the ATF from outside in, not by the Davidians from the inside out.

Bullet holes, for your information, reveal the direction the bullet was traveling.

Fortunately photographs taken at the time show this clearly, because after the incineration of “the children” that ended the alleged “sexual abuse,” the feds “lost” the door and bulldozed the entire site level.

What it comes down to is that Clover believes that anyone who violates any law – or resists law enforcement in any way – deserves whatever they get. This circular (and ethically imbecilic) reasoning absolves law enforcement of any responsibility or restraint – while demanding abject submission from all mundanes.

In essence, cops can do no wrong. And it is always wrong to question/disobey cops. If you do, you get what you deserve.

“… there is only one fact that is relevant. There was a legal search warrant for the compound.”

You raised one objection after another. Others demolished one objection after another.

Now you say “… there is only one fact that is relevant. There was a legal search warrant for the compound.”

Well hell, why didn’t you say that in the first place, instead of pretending you gave a damn about all the other factual disputes you raised?

Why didn’t you admit from the beginning that the only thing that mattered to you is that “The Government” had a “legal search warrant for the compound?” In other words, that “The Government” should be able to “authorize” any action it wants to take?

You sound suspicious clover, a likely terror suspect. What is your country and place of origin? The current administration says it is OK if they bomb it back to the preindustrial age, as long as they they think (no proof required), you hurt someone. Would that make everyone in N.Y. safer? Would that end the “terrorisim”?

How many air strikes, dead and crippled Ameican soldiers, dead and crippled locals does it take? When does it end? Or does it never end? When will clover’s world be world is safe? When can we all go back to playing baseball & fly on an airplane unmolested?

“They did go after me. At age 19, I was arrested and caged – and faced a decade in prison – for the non-crime of growing pot plants.”

Absolutely Kafkasque.

The alarmism would be comical if it did not lead to travesties of justice such as the one inflicted on you.

Foreword from the 1936 film “Reefer Madness.”

The motion picture you are about to witness may startle you . It would not have been possible otherwise, to sufficiently emphasize the frightful toll of the new drug menace which is destroying the youth of America in alarmingly increasing numbers.

Marihuana is that drug — a violent narcotic — an unspeakable scourge — The Real Public Enemy Number One !

Its first effect is sudden violent, uncontrollable laughter, then come dangerous hallucinations — space expands — time slows down, almost stands still…. fixed ideas come next, conjuring up monstrous extravagances — followed by emotional disturbances, the total inability to direct thoughts, the loss of all power to resist physical emotions leading finally to acts of shocking violence … ending often in incurable insanity.

Ironic how the lurid descriptions of the symptoms are more apropos the self-appointed enforcers of the War on Some Drugs than on consumers!

To wit: “fixed ideas come next, conjuring up monstrous extravagances — followed by emotional disturbances, the total inability to direct thoughts, the loss of all power to resist physical emotions leading finally to acts of shocking violence.”

OMG Bevin! Reefer Madness! No. My favorite high school indoctrination movie. Now you are chipping away at the very foundation of our unique cultue. Do you realize how many probation, jail, courts, clerks & DEA cops you would put out of work? I won’t stand for it!

Clover oh clover won’t you come over. Here to Syria and put your mouth were your mouth is. Why don’t you put on your jack boots and help our exhausted men and women fight the terrorists. You’ve got 70 era autos than start spreading it around instead of bragging about it.

As for experts who are on this? What experts? You seem to have more faith in these overeducated idiots than the likes of Eric who speaks for the real people who own 70’s era cars. The so called experts got us into this mess and if they get us out of it the USA won’t look anything like it does today.

Do not put your faith in princes because it was people like you who put them there!

“Let them continue using gas and chemical weapons and then you would have how many millions killed in NY city? Those guys over there would do it in a second if they had a chance.”

What do you mean by “let them?” Are YOU willing to stop them, or do you mean killing some brown people in a foreign country that is of no threat to the U.S. – because they’ve been killing each other for centuries? I’ve got it – they’re alleged to be killing each other – lets tell them in advance what we intend to attack, give them time to remove hardware from the intended attack sites, then bomb the crap out of them. Who then, will we be bombing?

And of course they will just sit idly by, and decide not to launch Sunburn anti-ship missiles, potentially killing potentially thousands of US Service men and women who are pawns in the horrific “game.”

Go stop the alleged gassing yourself, Clover.

Since our benevolent government has been arming human heart eating Al Qaeda terrorists, seem that bombing a bunch more people will likely make them like us even less. Kill them because they are killing each other.

Side step the US commitment to the UN, because Mighty O-Bomb-Ya says “we” should bomb them. Sounds logical to me.

The experts are indeed expert… but not at what you think. The problem is the experts who spend all of their time on such subjects are fictional.

They only pretend to spend all their time on such subjects.

After 25 years of working around them, being consulted by them, and generally observing their workings I can tell you, in fact, that they spend ‘all’ their time devising ways to show maximal failure spun as minimal success that could be rectified or expanded with “just a few more personnel, just a little more budget”. Or they spend ‘all their time’ to push the actual work to the lowest level functionaries they can. You know? The ones who can take the fall?

The REAL higher ups spend “all their time” doing both.

You might note that NONE OF THESE ACTIVITIES IS PRODUCTIVE IN ANY WAY.

But had you devoted even a pair of cloverish brain cells to the task you’d realize that Government Workers incentives are ALWAYS PERVERSE.

Think about that.

Government does not expand with success. When everything is good, no one wants government. Government managers, organizations, and employees don’t get raises in return for success. They get more money and power in response to DISASTER – FAILURE by any other name.

Government managers and organizations flourish on FAILURE, and WITHER ON SUCCESS.

THE INCENTIVES ARE PERVERSE.

While the incentives for Syria may or may not be those Eric has highlighted, you can be certain – DEAD ON CERTAIN – that whatever the incentives turn out to have been, they will be PERVERSE INCENTIVES – BECAUSE THAT IS THE NATURE OF GOVERNMENT.

The rest is just a function of where we are on the curve of moral collapse at the moment, with any atrocity you may imagine being purposely created at the far end of the spectrum.

The specters of totalitarian regimes past silently bear witness. The degree of totality of government power is the measure of the crimes they actually committed.

They did it – and will do it – because it benefits them personally and because they can.

“Do more, make more mistakes, do less, make less mistakes, do nothing, make no mistakes”

The last one “bu cuo” or “make no mistakes” is a pun. It also means “not bad,” as in “not a bad decision.”

My own dad was a diplomat for the Republic of China. So he was a “civil servant.” But he was rare exception. He was in some respects like “Boxer” in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

Boxer is also caring and looks out for the other animals for example when they are hungry he makes sure somehow they get food. Boxer has various mottos right through from the beginning of the story that are defining to his persona, such as: “I will work harder.”

Needless to say, no good deed goes unpunished. The System has no place for people like that. They are chewed up and spit out.

We’ll still see a lot of “awake” people doing the usual exclaiming to government about the results of these actions, as if things were being run by people who were dumb or didn’t know what they were doing.

So it’s good to see an article pointing out, finally, that these monsters know EXACTLY what they are doing.

I’m now convinced the Elites are in a desperate race to the end. The Tipping Point has come; the Tower is falling. It’s about ten degrees to the vertical now, just starting to really feel gravity. The fall is slow–but it will come, and it will come extremely quickly as the tower leans further.

The Elites will act in desperation. They are completely, utterly, incomprehensibly corrupt and wickedly evil. They are dissipated and decadent, and insanely depraved. They’re so isolated they’ve disconnected from reality.

That disconnect from reality might send us head-long into WWIII. Their Luciferian eschatology makes them believe they’re immune from the apocalypse they’re releasing; they think they’ll survive in their well-stocked bunkers. But like Elites throughout history, they’re eating their own children, sacrificing them to their gods to maintain their own power just a little longer.

So the good news is, we’re winning–the Elites have been unmasked sufficiently that the dumbed-down populace is slowly coming to see them for the psychopaths they are.
The bad news is the Elites might kill a large percentage of us on their way out.